This week saw the launch of the latest cloud offering from IBM -  LotusLive iNotes - a hosted resilient mail solution to compete against Google and Microsoft.

This kicked off the ongoing debate (internally) about the general move, or perceived move, to cloud based services. The lure of dispensing with complex in-house server environments and all the associated costs of maintaining them, in favour of consolidated, centralised managed services is tempting many organisations.

Of course the devil is in the detail and the vision of "The Cloud" for customers tends to have a thousand shades of gray. Wikipedia defines cloud computing as -

"an example of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them."

On this basis, enterprises that already have a data centre or hub site that has links allowing users to connect from the Internet are already providing a form of (Private) cloud services. Moving further into the cloud is really a discussion on improving resilience, scalability and a support model for those services. This could entail moving to hosted environments with managed servers through to outsourcing complete solutions such as email to a provider such as IBM.

Many enterprises still consider the Public Cloud as currently a no-go area. Reasons include data security  and SLA concerns, data compliance/governance regulations and the complexity of migrating legacy applications. This is where Private Clouds step-in by providing cloud benefits whilst retaining the data within the enterprise perimeter for compliance. For many this will provide a stepping stone to cloud services as issues around adopting Public Clouds are resolved.

The reality is that most organisations will end up with a Hybrid Cloud (think IBM coined that one) with a mixture of ring-fenced (bespoke or sensitive) services in a Private Cloud, and other standard offerings (email, productivity suites etc) supplied by Public Cloud vendors.

Gartner predicts that IT organisations will spend more on Private Clouds than Public Clouds through 2012, with the bulk of Public Cloud usage devoted to "very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by start-ups with little to no IT infrastructure".

Relating all this to the day job we are beginning to see companies adopting cloud strategies, with the objective of delivering services in a cloud model. To help them achieve this we are working on several infrastructure consolidation and virtualization projects, to reduce the footprint of services and prepare them for life beyond the LAN.

Comments (0) Peter Smith October 6th, 2009 11:30:28