Like Daz, I enjoyed reading Joe Weinman’s 6 Half-Truths About the Cloud this weekend. There is a lot of crap floating around about the cloud these days and sometimes I struggle to separate the good from the bad. Joe helps us with some honest assessments. One are in particular that has me irked of late is the so called “private cloud”. Thus far I’ve yet to be sold on this concept and suspect it’s a marketing term that is gathering steam propelled by companies who don’t have public clouds to sell. I’m probably wrong but I did enjoy how Joe characterised it
a “private cloud” makes as much sense as would be something like a “personal hotel.”
Quite. Mind you Tom Bittman of Gartner talks of Exchange Online dedicated as a private cloud which makes more sense to me than a private cloud in a private data center. I still don’t like the terminology though.
Whilst we’re on Tom, check out his coverage of the so called “Open Cloud Manifesto” that causes such a furore over the last few weeks. Who knew Gartner had such a good sense of humour :)
I can see some point in a private or exclusive cloud where a service provider wants to guarantee performance and capacity.
The private cloud becomes more than a WAN because there's shared capacity and a potential common interest amongst subscribers something akin to the mediatone network offered by WebEx, today it still has its place.
It's a traditional approach to networks rather than engineering adaptive capability in software and you are right these providers for the most part don't have applications optimised for the 21st century Cloud.
the question is should these closed communities of interest be serviced by virtual private clouds within the public cloud or band together to provide their own private infrastucture? I suspect in the current internet ecosystem and the gathering pace of multi megabit home connections the only way to be sure of your environment is to take a private cloud approach.
I've been doing some work for a 'security as a service' cloud vendor recently. What's interesting about that model is that large, multi-office companies get a real saving by consolidating all the web and email filtering with a cloud provider rather than replicate on-site systems in each office (or at least in each location where there is an Exchange server). However, companies give up a fair amount of control over their infrastructure when they outsource this way. This is a legitimate trade-off and is probably beneficial. However, in this sort of situation, you could imagine that a 'private cloud' could give these companies the benefits of outsourcing over the internet combined with the enhanced control of in-house systems. Still, I think this scenario is still somewhat hypothetical. It'll be interesting to see if security vendors start popping up offering MessageLabs-like services in a 'private cloud' configuration. I'm not sure there are any yet but I could be wrong.
Why are you doing this hidden url crap? Just post http://gigaom.com/2009/04/11/6-half-truths-about-the-cloud/
hey andre, thanks for pointing that out...not sure why the URL was hidden. very odd indeed....off to investigate (but have also fixed)
I *think* it may be because I grabbed the URL mistakenly from Daz's tweet rather than direct from GigaOm