Snohomish County in Washington began virtualizing servers in 2008 which reduced provisioning time for new applications from 6 weeks to under an hour. They have consolidated 200 data centers to 9, saving on physical server and licensing costs. The county has virtualized 80% of servers with plans to complete virtualization and automate the backend to transition to a private cloud. Holden Beach in North Carolina hosts its servers virtually off-island, allowing it to continue operations even when evacuating during hurricanes. Private clouds provide benefits like security, customization and scalability while allowing organizations to realize efficiencies through server consolidation.