While public clouds have hogged much of the limelight, large enterprises will most likely veer toward private and hybrid clouds
By Sanjay Gupta
The haze around cloud computing, I’m happy to note, has finally begun to clear. The common refrain in tech circles now is: Cloud is the way to go, all right.
But, wait a minute! Should it be the public cloud, the private cloud or that best-of-both-worlds thingy, the hybrid cloud?
In all likelihood, the answer is going to be the standard one usually given as the last check-box in a multiple-choice questionnaire: All of the above.
As enterprises of different shapes, sizes and persuasions begin their experiments with the cloud truth, they are discovering that one cloud does not fit all. So most are treading their journey to the cloud keeping in mind specific goals or specific needs.
For instance, many organizations are open to farming out applications such as HR, payroll, CRM, sales force automation and others to public cloud providers while keeping control of ERP, supply chain, financial and other business-critical applications.
It is true that much of the limelight is cornered by public cloud services such as those from Amazon and Google but, increasingly, all the big enterprise cloud deployments will have private or hybrid flavors. There are multiple reasons for this.
For one, private or hybrid clouds allow large enterprises to take advantage of the cost-effectiveness and scalability of a public cloud environment while meeting their strategic objective of keeping some critical server/storage operations on-premises.
Another reason is that most companies would want to put their existing infrastructure to better use through private/hybrid cloud deployments rather than phase it out completely. The same goes for the IT staff they have: they would like to continue to employ their engineers (maybe they’ll redeploy some to take better advantage of the new IT architecture but no-one is going to rely completely on third-party staff).
While security continues to be a key concern, there seems to be a general agreement that private or hybrid clouds might offer tighter controls—and hence better security—against possible breaches. This perception, whether true or not, will also work in favor of private and hybrid clouds.
Not everything in cloud is settled, however. It is widely believed that standards around cloud services are not yet mature. And there are interoperability and migration issues for different cloud as well as infrastructure providers.
If anything, the next few months will witness enterprises matching the intent of cloud vendors with their real-world capabilities and worth.
– Sanjay Gupta
Editor, Express Computer
