Enterprise Cloud Alex bligh
Why EnTErPriSE PrivATE ClOud iS A STEP TO PubliC ClOud AdOPTiOn
Alex Bligh looks at the business sense for both public and private clouds
We all agree that the business drivers to adopt cloud-based solutions are powerful and well known. These are often treated as applying equally to public and private clouds. However this is not necessarily the case. There is therefore much debate in the cloud industry as to the circumstances that make public or private cloud right for a given organisation. Superficially, private cloud appears to carry a number of advantages over public cloud in terms of security of data, location and jurisdiction guarantees. Private cloud enables organisations to avoid paying for a service provider’s profit margin and the cost of having another party involved. With these advantages, why should private clouds not dominate? To answer this question, let’s first look at the drivers for public cloud adoption.
REASONS FOR PUBLIC CLOUD ADOPTION
GigaOM Pro research showed that among 277 com- panies moving some work to a public cloud, 59% cited cost savings as their primary motivation. Gartner fore- casts that public cloud services will grow at a com- pound rate of 17.7% through 2016. A 451 Group survey showed that 34% of organisations say their company will be using public cloud computing six months from now. So, what are the drivers for public cloud adop- tion? What makes a cloud platform more cost effec- tive than alternative technologies?
There are nine main characteristics of a public
www.cloudcomputingintelligence.com January 2013 CCI Magazine cloud that, listed together, almost spell ‘cucumber’:
Cost Effective: More cost-effective than a custom deployment
Utility: Paid on a utility basis, pay as you use model Commodity: Provisioned at scale Universality: homogenous service components Multi-tenancy: Enabling more than one user of the same resources
aBstraction: virtual resources abstracted from physical resources
Elasticity: rapid provision and deprovision Reliability: built for failure
Together these characteristics provide a more valuable service to the customer, and cost savings for the service provider, which are in turn passed on to the customer. Almost all of these characteristics derive their cost advantages from the scale of a multi- tenant deployment. For instance, only with sufficient scale can one provide a cloud capable of meeting the elasticity demands of customers, whilst still ensuring resources are always available on demand.
HOW DO PRIVATE CLOUDS FARE? Private cloud is in essence an attempt to use pub-
lic cloud’s technology in an enterprise environment. Private clouds can capture some of the economic benefits of public clouds, for instance by reducing transaction costs, decreasing inventory costs or mak- ing use of cloud software techniques, such as taking advantage of scalable database technologies. how- ever, in all but the largest organisations, they cannot be built to the same scale, or gain the advantages of multi-tenancy. While private clouds capture some of the advantages of a public cloud platform, in economic terms a public cloud will ultimately be the winner in most circumstances. indeed private clouds carry their own additional costs, such as a hardware refresh, training iT staff, orchestration software and the management and hardware overhead of operating an in-house cloud solution.
SO WHY ARE PRIVATE CLOUDS POPULAR? Firstly, a move to a public cloud requires not only
technological change, but also organisation change, as the iT department’s empire is outsourced. Clearly such change carries a cost, but this should be set
31
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68