Before Amazon introduced cloud services, most companies purchased and maintained hardware like servers, storage devices, and networking devices. They kept this hardware in their internal on-premises data centers and co-location facilities to support their IT operations. After we launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), companies attempted to replicate the cloud computing model on their internal infrastructure. The term private cloud was introduced to distinguish between these internal cloud environments and third-party, public cloud services provided by organizations like us.
Today, some companies have adopted technologies and changes in their operations to offer some of the concepts of cloud computing. One example is that companies can charge their business units for the computing resources that they use. However, for the most part, customers have not truly succeeded in deploying a private cloud with benefits comparable to the public cloud.