One of the key advantages of Private cloud hosting is security as compared to public clouds, but only if it is implemented properly over the cloud infrastructure. Several levels of security need to be considered in a public cloud hosting environment.

A private cloud hosting environment comes with a wide range of tools and features to protect the user accounts and resources from any unauthorized use. Using credentials for access control, HTTPS endpoints for encrypted data transmission, various logical administrative/user controls and the associated authentication and authorization, user activity logging of security monitoring are all part of the security protocols. Let us discuss 6 important tips to secure the on-premise infrastructure.

6 Tips to Secure your Data in Private Cloud –
Secure Registration: The process to validate, verify and register a customer and the server over the infrastructure is called secure registration. A cloud service provider sets up the IP addresses on the host via an SSH terminal session to the server console while installing the cloud in this process.
Access Control: The access control of the infrastructure is primarily divided among the cloud administrator, business unit admin, project admin, and project member/user. All the groups use Server-side authentication to gain access control of the system. Each group has different levels of defined access and privileges.
Authentication: All the credentials of the admins, as well as external accounts such as VMware, external storage, and Active Directory, are stored securely on the private cloud server using one-way encryption in the internal cloud authentication database. Once a user is authenticated to access managed private cloud, a temporary session key is generated from the private cloud server authentication service that monitors the user’s action and commands performed within that session. The user logs out of the system, as soon as the key expires and need to log in again with the same credentials if required.
Key Pairs: The private cloud hosting infrastructure is bound to generate private/public key pairs to secure the access to a VM. These key pairs work by keeping the private key on the private cloud server and the public key on the local workstation. The cloud verifies that these keys match before establishing a secure connection.
Tools and Techniques: There are various tools and techniques that can be implemented to secure the private cloud hosting services and some of them are mentioned as:
Suggested reading – Confused Between Public vs Private Cloud: Some Factors to Consider

Restoring Cloud Servers in a customer location: The private cloud servers are not directly reachable from the cloud infrastructure because it physically resides on-premises in a customer location behind their own firewall. Also, the base OS running on each private cloud server is protected using a user ID and password for additional security.
Keeping Customer Data On-Premises: All the customer data, compute instances, networks, volumes, and object store data is stored on the on-premises hardware. Only the roles with appropriate credentials have access to the assets in the system.
SaaS Security: Using the HTTPSthe traffic between the cloud and the servers can be encrypted and the communication can be made secure. The private cloud establishes the outbound connections only.
No new connections and new ports establishment: The cloud hosting provider must assure that there are no inbound connections established and no new ports are opened on the firewall to ensure the added level of security to the private cloud infrastructure. This reduces vulnerabilities and attacks to a great extent.
Application Security: There exists three-level of application security on the private cloud hosting infrastructure that offers a completely secured cloud as compared to public clouds or standard virtualized environments. These three levels of security are:
Per-VM firewall policy: The VM comes up with no open ports as the default. Only specific ports can be accessed
Running behind a perimeter firewall: The cloud platform can be run behind the customer’s standard perimeter firewall that assures the developers that the VMs are not running any binaries and will not exploit the servers. Especially, in a public cloud, everyone is deploying a VM and others are not aware which ports are open and what applications are running. This slows down the innovation process and the agility of application delivery. Hence, this is one of the major advantages of private cloud hosting over the public cloud.
Isolated private networks: Users can create private networks that are completely isolated from each other. Since each network or set of VM can be deployed on a private network easily, so one can choose any subnet while creating the network and does not have to wait for a network admin to provide an IP subnet range. This helps in enabling faster self-service isolation.