While SaaS providers’ private clouds may look similar to internal IT infrastructure at a high level (i.e., both are private, dedicated environments), they are fundamentally different in design philosophy, operational maturity, and customer-facing reliability. SaaS private clouds are engineered with cloud-native principles, extreme resilience, and service-level guarantees — far beyond what traditional internal IT usually provides.

So yes, both are "private" in terms of access, but SaaS providers' private clouds are purpose-built to serve external customers at scale, with enterprise-grade resilience and automation, unlike traditional internal IT.