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.
On CIOL web, 28th Jan 2010.
