Cloud computing is the hottest topic to talk about these days between IT people. Some really flatter the words while at the same time some others are a bit gun shy to talk about it. Cloud computing has been seen as a “golden bullet” to use/manage IT. Will it really help IT to be the “GPS of Business”. Are we really there now? As a young IT professional, I decided to give it a try to explain what I personally believe.
I would like to divide the phase into three main group as; Virtualization, Private Clouds (Internal Clouds), Public Clouds. It all started by virtualization of x86 machines. In today’s distributed environments, where up to 85 percent of computing capacity sits idle, there is a tremendous amount of waste, waste that companies no longer can afford. Maintaining current IT infrastructure sucks up about 70 percent of today’s IT budgets while new solutions and capabilities go begging. So, there was a big utilization problem and virtualization solved it successfully. Now, it is a main stream approach and has been already applied by a big portion of the enterprises. The ability to consolidate large server farms and better utilize hardware is a proven route to significant cost savings, and may also assist with corporate green initiatives in reducing CO2 emissions.
Second step, after virtualization is I think Private Clouds (Internal Clouds). Using already virtualized servers containing pre-defined content from templates can help organizations to scale swiftly, be more agile and react to market demands as they change. While sometimes cheaper than Managed Hosting, Private Cloud still carries a price premium as it runs on dedicated hardware thereby making it unsuitable for organizations with the very smallest budgets. Therefore, HP sells Utility Ready Storage and Blades together with powerful software (monitoring, management, business availability, distributed hardware management, storage management and optimization tools) to help enterprises to lower their upfront costs. Instead of buying Server, Storage, Networking hardware; enterprises can hire them from HP, which are packaged and ready to be used and build their Private Clouds. They can either build their own private clouds (internal clouds) or sell cloud based hosting or storage solutions to the market.
Last step, after private clouds, is Public Cloud. To make it more appealing, I would like to simulate The Cloud by Lego pieces. I think many of you know Lego, which you use to build your own shapes. In the basic Lego packages there are pre-defined, pre-shaped pieces. But, by using those pieces people can build almost endless special shape. SO, at the very end enterprises will be able to select different software pieces and integrate them with each other to build their own specific solutions. Every component will be able to work perfectly with each other without requiring major changes.
Public Cloud is currently ideal for mostly young businesses seeking uncomplicated IT hosting with minimal outlay and no complicated contracts. The ability of most public cloud offerings to scale effortlessly is particularly attractive for websites and applications that have either seasonal demand, or unpredictable traffic. Another quite separate use of Virtual Servers hosted in the Public Cloud is for test and development of applications and User Acceptance Testing (UAT). The flexibility for coders to create new Cloud servers in a matter of minutes and to be billed only for what they use makes this attractive to any software development organization. To sum up, public clouds are suitable only for the startups or non-critical applications/data of enterprises. It still needs few years before we really see cloud solutions in the main market.
All in all, I position Virtualization in the Early Majority, Private Clouds in the Early Adopters and Public Clouds in the Innovators segment at the TALC as you can see from the graph above. Virtualization is an effective and proven technology in the market now. After virtualization, enterprises will start building their own clouds (Private Clouds) and after that step, I think we will see more and more public cloud solutions in the main market.
PS: For more information about TALC, please check:
IT - Telecom Business 
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