Last week I attended the <a href="http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09">GigaOM Structure 09 Conference</a>, which is an innovation-oriented cloud computing conference. One of the interesting things about the Silicon Valley-based event: it brought together a mix of different types of companies, emerging technology products and services, and people with cloud challenges:
A couple of weeks ago Forrester released a report on cloud computing, based upon a survey of small and large enterprises located in North America and Europe. I was particularly interested in its findings as it addressed the question of private (internal) cloud computing.
If you've been reading this series, you now have a better understanding of the much-discussed term "private cloud." In the previous two parts of this series, I described the features and service capabilities of private clouds.
Private clouds are a hot topic these days, but not everyone agrees on a definition or the potential benefits.
The topic of private clouds is heating up. A private cloud is, essentially, a cloud computing capability dedicated to one organization. The term "internal cloud" is often used for this kind of functionality, but as many people point out, the term "internal cloud" conflates functionality with location. T
Two weeks ago, I attended two conferences that illustrated the current chasm between cloud computing advocates and mainstream IT organizations.
McKinsey, the doyen of strategy consultants,published a report on cloud computing last week featuring a disguised real-world case study. While the report doesn't explicitly state the fact, it seems that the paper is a summary of the results of a strategy project with a financial services firm, which apparently engaged McKinsey to assess whether it would make sense to move all of its systems to Amazon Web Services.
Nick Carr was right and I was wrong. Sort of, anyway.<br/>
The changing nature of IT, as well as the rapid evolution of business processes, means that you'll likely face the need for an analytical tool like Hadoop in the very near future.
Where you come down on that question depends a great deal on how you think most IT organizations will consume cloud services. How will IT organizations achieve an infrastructure that scales easily, can be reconfigured in minutes rather than weeks, and has a transparent cost based on usage?
Bernard Golden has picked apart the arguments against cloud computing. Cloud's not perfect yet, but make no mistake, he says: When security and productivity come into conflict, productivity always prevails. You can't ignore cloud any more than you can ignore virtualization.
Cloud's too hard and too costly to manage? No, says Bernard Golden, as he tackles the last of five key concerns about cloud computing in the enterprise.
We tackle the fourth big argument against cloud computing: TCO vs. in-house servers. The real maths may surprise you.
Another common objection to cloud computing is the one that has to do with service-level agreements.
In the first part of this series on The Case Against Cloud Computing, I noted that in speaking with a number of people involved with cloud computing, they (rather paradoxically) discussed with great vigor all the barriers to enterprises adopting cloud computing. As a result, I thought it would be useful to discuss the list of issues they (collectively) raised and offer some thoughts about them, particularly with regard to the potential for mitigation. The first of the series addressed the issue that, today at least, it is not possible to do a straight migration of a typically-architected corporate application into any of the common cloud services-they all impose their own architecture.