Private Clouds
As the hype over Cloud Computing settles down and the Cloud becomes just one tool in the toolset available to a CIO or a CTO, there are specific flavors of the Cloud that are gaining favor. While originally the term Cloud Computing meant using CPU cycles in the cloud (Externally owned off premise network, usually depicted by a cloud in network diagrams) to accomplish compute intensive tasks, the term was co-opted by Marketing departments and broadened to include everything from Software as a Service to Plain old Application Hosting.
As IT management internalized what Cloud Computing meant for their companies, they began to question which capabilities their IT departments were truly Core Competencies and which were not. Most of them began to realize that for most small to medium sized companies maintaining their own Data Center was not a Core Competency.
The economics of Data Centers with their heavy initial investment and expensive care and feeding greatly benefit from scale. The larger the Data Center operation as indicated by internal or external customer demand, the easier it is to amortize capital and operating expenses needed for running it. You may need 3 people to run even the smallest of Data Centers due to availability needs and specialized skills. However 5 people may be able to run one that is 10 times as big due to automation that becomes viable at that larger scale. So large Cloud Computing providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and increasingly RackSpace can get really good at running Data Centers reliably, securely (more on that later) and in a way that allows customers to get environments stood up in a matter of hours, sometimes even minutes.
For very large corporations, one can argue, have the scale necessary to run Data Centers themselves. I think CIOs and CTOs at small and medium companies will increasingly come to the realization a specialized firm can do this better and potentially cheaper.
Most of the attention within IT has been focussed on applications that are exposed to the outside world: Web Applications, Content Applications etc. However as IT management embraces the idea that if security and reliability needs can be met, external providers are just as good if not better than internal providers, they realize that corporate applications like Finance, HR and LOB applications could potentially run on 3rd Party Private Clouds. These are sometimes referred to as "VPN (Virtual Private Network)" clouds. These are networks hosted by Cloud providers that through some specialized networking hardware and software become part of a company's internal network. Some of the traffic is being routed over the network but appears to be local to the company.
Today for a startup that is trying to make the most of the dollars it has, using a combination of public and private Cloud infrastructure makes sense.
As the hype over Cloud Computing settles down and the Cloud becomes just one tool in the toolset available to a CIO or a CTO, there are specific flavors of the Cloud that are gaining favor. While originally the term Cloud Computing meant using CPU cycles in the cloud (Externally owned off premise network, usually depicted by a cloud in network diagrams) to accomplish compute intensive tasks, the term was co-opted by Marketing departments and broadened to include everything from Software as a Service to Plain old Application Hosting.
As IT management internalized what Cloud Computing meant for their companies, they began to question which capabilities their IT departments were truly Core Competencies and which were not. Most of them began to realize that for most small to medium sized companies maintaining their own Data Center was not a Core Competency.
The economics of Data Centers with their heavy initial investment and expensive care and feeding greatly benefit from scale. The larger the Data Center operation as indicated by internal or external customer demand, the easier it is to amortize capital and operating expenses needed for running it. You may need 3 people to run even the smallest of Data Centers due to availability needs and specialized skills. However 5 people may be able to run one that is 10 times as big due to automation that becomes viable at that larger scale. So large Cloud Computing providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and increasingly RackSpace can get really good at running Data Centers reliably, securely (more on that later) and in a way that allows customers to get environments stood up in a matter of hours, sometimes even minutes.
For very large corporations, one can argue, have the scale necessary to run Data Centers themselves. I think CIOs and CTOs at small and medium companies will increasingly come to the realization a specialized firm can do this better and potentially cheaper.
Most of the attention within IT has been focussed on applications that are exposed to the outside world: Web Applications, Content Applications etc. However as IT management embraces the idea that if security and reliability needs can be met, external providers are just as good if not better than internal providers, they realize that corporate applications like Finance, HR and LOB applications could potentially run on 3rd Party Private Clouds. These are sometimes referred to as "VPN (Virtual Private Network)" clouds. These are networks hosted by Cloud providers that through some specialized networking hardware and software become part of a company's internal network. Some of the traffic is being routed over the network but appears to be local to the company.
Today for a startup that is trying to make the most of the dollars it has, using a combination of public and private Cloud infrastructure makes sense.
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