Virtualization and various forms of cloud computing have changed the way companies run their operations. Scrappy online startups realize the need of renting computing power from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (News - Alert). But now, due to security concerns, custom requirements, and in some cases following the path of big business, these startups are creating their own private clouds.

Organizations like PayPal, the U.S. National Security Agency, Samsung (News - Alert), BestBuy.com, Comcast, Bloomberg and even a group of particle physicists are among those that have launched their own isolated networks.

At PayPal, a unit of eBay (News - Alert), developers used to have to fill out as many as 100 forms and sit through hours of meetings to roll out a small service, recalls Saran Mandair, the company's senior director of platform engineering and operations.

Now programmers can log into a portal where they can upload code to test, change and deploy.

BestBuy.com is also shaving time off its development cycle with a newly launched cloud. The company has more than 40 development teams around the world working on its website, which were using a variety of setups to test their projects.

Randall Sobie, a research scientist at the University of Victoria's Institute of Particle Physics said in a statement, “Research centers around the world collect huge amounts of data when they run experiments. The detector at CERN, for instance – which led to the discovery of the Higgs Boson – required racks of processors used to filter data.” 

Sobie and his colleagues would like to make those servers available to physicists anywhere. "They're being converted to OpenStack clouds," Sobie says. 

Open Stack is an open-source technology developed by NASA and Rackspace. It's one of many different systems – including offerings from CloudStack, VMware, Microsoft (News - Alert) and Eucalyptus – that businesses use to build internal clouds, and it's popping up in some surprising places.