Cloud
computing will be hybrid: Ovum
MELBOURNE,
AUSTRALIA: Cloud computing, the most important trend for 2010 has barely even
started, says Ovum, an analyst and consulting company. The next three years
will see Cloud computing mature rapidly as vendors and enterprises come to grip
with the opportunities and challenges that it represents.
Cloud computing - Been There Done That
Some
prefer to limit Cloud computing to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and
platform-as-a-service (PaaS), whilst others also consider software-as-a-service
(SaaS) and private clouds part of the phenomenon.
A wider
perspective helps understand one of the key trends in Cloud computing - cloud
computing will be hybrid. "Enterprises will mix and match public and private
cloud elements with traditional hosting and outsourcing services to create
solutions that fit short and long-term requirements", comments Laurent
Lachal, Senior Analyst.
"The
past 18 months have seen a significant shift in focus away from public clouds
towards private ones owing to a powerful mix of vendor push and user
pull", said Lachal based in London. The private cloud is, to a large
extent, a re-badging of what data centre-focused hardware, software and service
vendors have been doing under different names (such as utility computing,
autonomic IT, on demand data centre etc.) for the past 10 years.
Many users
are wary of public clouds' quality of service in areas such as reliability, availability,
scalability and security but curious about the possibility of adopting some of
their characteristics (e.g. on demand instant provisioning of IT assets).
Private
clouds are either defined as the aim of the data centre evolution journey (a
long patient maturation process) or as shortcuts along the way that push parts
of the data centre ahead to deliver focused return on investment (the private
cloud is the part(s) of the data centre ahead of the rest).
What is
needed is a way to reconcile the two approaches (private-cloud-as-a-journey and
as-a-shortcut) to understand when, on the road towards a next generation data
centres, should users take shortcuts. Unfortunately, most vendors currently
emphasises the second approach rather than trying to reconcile the two.
"Cloud computing promises to tackles two irreconcilable (so far) IT challenges - the
need to lower costs and boost innovation – but it will take a lot of efforts
from enterprises to actually make it work. Instead of a nimbler IT with their
IT mess for less somewhere else, the ill-prepared will end up with their IT
mess spread across a wider area", said Lachal.
Lachal
believes that adoption is a two-way street. "It is not just about whether Cloud computing is ready for enterprises, it is, more importantly, whether or
not enterprises are ready for it", said Lachal, author of the
report. The fact is that many enterprises are currently not particularly
ready for either private or public clouds or any type of hybrids in between.
Besides the current confusion as to what exactly Cloud computing is, many
enterprises lack the knowledge, skills and metrics to figure out what is best
for them. They need to be able figure out how to mix and match:
·Totally
private and shared private clouds (to collaborate with partners on common
goals).
·Public
and private clouds, with public clouds used, for example, for workloads that
have unpredictable spikes in their use, for application that are only
occasionally used or to turn the pre-production infrastructure (used for test,
migrations etc.) into production one and use public clouds instead (since
pre-production tasks have much lower requirements in terms of quality of
service than production ones).
·Public
clouds and traditional hosting/outsourcing service offerings: for example
hosted offerings are usually cheaper for static web sites than the Amazon IaaS
service. On the other hand, for use such as application testing, where a
handful of server is required for a few weeks and a few hours per day, Amazon
IaaS is the answer.
·Pubic
clouds offerings (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), based on their respective cost
effectiveness.
To do so,
they need to improve their knowledge of which asset cost what in public and
private clouds as well as traditional hosting/outsourcing service offerings as
well as their ability to monitor, meter and bill usage. Few enterprises
can currently do so. Achieving all of this will take time and tears.
Cloud computing is here. Running applications on
machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages.
Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For
on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system,
some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud
need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide
this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform
for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.
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