In other words, the trade off for more security risk is more access to opportunities for growth in capabilities and resources.
That is rubbish. Private clouds can and will be augmented by public cloud services. With private clouds you get to own and keep an eye on your data, while you optionally leverage public cloud services when you need to temporarily scale, or quickly take advantage of services. Private clouds give you the best of both worlds. Plus, I don't see how public clouds are going to make much money. Popular SaaS companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, have income levels that are about twenty-something million dollars a quarter, or less. According to the chart in this article, Amazon is projected to make about $58M from public cloud computing in 2010. All on-premise vendors need to do, is emphasize the advantages of customers owning their own IT infrastructure - leaving control of one of the most valuable company assets in their hands, and not in someone else's. On premise vendors then can simplify the ownership and management of private clouds, through technology and services. This way, IT will continue to grow, rather than suffer an overall contraction - like what Linux has done to the Unix market.
Is private cloud computing a fatally flawed concept?
Ian Thomas responded to my recent post on companies doing private cloud for clouds’ sake, and not building a business case beforehand. (Shades of the whole SOA debate that has been going on for the past few years.)
In a recent post, Ian also warned of private cloud projects being driven too much in the name of IT, and not in the name of the business. He observes that many private cloud initiatives seek to address “control, service, and security,” and hence, are being pitched as alternatives to public cloud engagements. In the process, private cloud cases fail to take on the greater business “ilities” cloud computing could deliver — flexibility, agility, and scalability, to name a few.
Private clouds are just another way or perpetuating limited, closed systems, and the true promise of cloud lies in opening up to the global network, Ian says. As he puts it:
“The very concerns that are expressed as reasons not to move to cloud models – due to a concentration on FUD around a small number of technical issues – are actually the things that businesses have most to gain from should they be bold and start a managed transition to new models. Cloud models will give them control over their IT by allowing them to choose from different providers to optimize different areas of their business without sacrificing scale and management benefits; service levels of cloud providers – whilst not currently guaranteed – are often better than they’ve ever experienced and entrusting security to focused third parties is probably smarter than leaving it as one of many diverse concerns for stretched IT departments.”
In other words, the trade off for more security risk is more access to opportunities for growth in capabilities and resources. That’s a trade off that’s been constantly weighed or made since the Internet first exploded on the business scene almost two decades ago. The cloud magnifies that question.
