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01 Dec 2009
Organisations are more likely to spend their money on investments in private clouds in the next few years despite the many benefits of public cloud infrastructures, according to analyst firm Gartner.
In a research note published today, distinguished analyst Tom Bittman argued that private cloud services would provide a stepping stone to public services, with the latter maybe taking decades to mature enough for enterprise use.
“The hype of cloud computing is that existing IT architectures and processes can be simply replaced by the cloud," he added.
“The reality of the future IT organisation, however, is somewhat a combination. Larger organisations will continue to have an IT organisation that manages and deploys IT resources internally, some of which will be ‘private clouds’. IT organisations will also take on IT service sourcing responsibility, determining when to leverage external providers, when to deploy internally, and when to leverage both for specific services.”
Firms first need to decide which services are ripe for migrating to the cloud and which should always be kept in-house and then take a decision about whether it makes business sense to wait for a mature public cloud offering or develop a private cloud sooner.
Bittman advised firms in the next 12 months to develop a dynamic sourcing organisation that can make these kinds of decisions, as well as an overall cloud computing strategy.
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Do you agree?
The right strategy is private cloud with the capability to extend to public cloud
CA?s experience is that companies of all sizes are very interested in the Public Cloud proposition, and who wouldn?t be when you can rent servers for as little as 11 cents per hour. That said, few if any are willing to move core business applications to the cloud model, and some will never do so where the risk outweighs the benefits. But there are exceptions - look at the recent uptake of public email services to replace in-house corporate email, which is considered by many as a business critical application containing confidential data. And some companies have already hosted stand-alone, low risk applications in a public cloud environment. Gartner is right in that companies should be investing in solutions that enable a private cloud infrastructure to enable them to realise some of the benefits of the public cloud, without the risks. But a key criteria is to ensure that their private cloud solution can also exploit public cloud resource in the future. The Cloud will really come into its own is when companies can augment their own IT infrastructure with resources from the Cloud with minimal risk. And with the current rate of technology change, that day will arrive sooner than we think.
Posted by: Jonathan Price 04 Dec 2009
So Gartner are hyping the hype cycle?
As someone involved with cloud services for several years now, I know of no one who says that "existing IT architectures and processes can be simply replaced by the cloud". The fact that there's a general buzz everywhere does not lead to that conclusion if anything more than a cursory look is made. Anyone who is hearing that, especially Gartner, aren't listening or are grossly simplifying for a headline. Cloud services are part of a delivery continuum and just as compute embraces both PCs and P Series, clouds come in different shapes and sizes. My view is that most companies can derive benefit from cloud services now. I also know that most companies wont wholly move to cloud services. That is not an oxymoron.
Posted by: Andrew Gough 02 Dec 2009
"Decades to mature" - sounds like a long time in the technology world
I find this assessment a little difficult to swallow. Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google all have offerings that have massive investments behind them and they are not aimed at just the SME or consumer. They are architected and priced so that ISVs or enterprises can run their applications in the Cloud - reliably and securely - and I am sure that their business models do not assume 10-20 years to break even. So maybe the reference is to the maturity of enterprise clients willingness to use public Clouds. The revenue growth of Salesforce.com in the enterprise sector and a just one of many article in teh computer press "Chief information officers are more comfortable with the idea of cloud computing than they were six months ago" ComputerWeekly suggests that enterprises will take less than decades to adopt public clouds. So maybe the jury is out - or Gartner are predicting in 'internet-years' where a decade is the same as one earth-year.
Posted by: ian gotts 01 Dec 2009