A private cloud contains application hosting and computing services or a private internal network and is only open to the company and limited customers, rather than the public. This is often referred to as an internal or organizational cloud.

Private cloud computing provides companies with much of the same advantages synonymous with the public cloud, including self-service and scalability, along with greater leverage and customisation over conventional computing resources housed within the workplace environment.

In comparison, private clouds can offer a greater degree of protection and privacy to ensure that the activities and personal data are not available to third-party providers.

The company can also combine private clouds with public clouds to create hybrid clouds. One such technology that supports this model is to take advantage of cloud bursting to increase the amount of computing space and scale computing resources to the public cloud only when demand for computing increase