The migration to the cloud has barely started with the next three years
to see cloud computing mature rapidy as businesses mix and match cloud services, according to a new report by Ovum.
In the
report, 2010 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing, Ovum predicts that
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and
software-as-a-service (SaaS) and private clouds will form a hybrid mix
of cloud technologies in the enterprise.
“Enterprises will
mix and match public and private cloud elements with traditional
hosting and outsourcing services to create solutions that fit short and
long-term requirements”, said Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst. “The past
18 months have seen a significant shift in focus away from public
clouds towards private ones owing to a powerful mix of vendor push and
user pull.”
Laurent says that private clouds are mere
re-badging of what current hosting service vendors have already been
doing for over 10 years.
“It is not just about whether cloud computing is ready for enterprises, it is,
more importantly, whether or not enterprises are ready for it”, said Lachal
Many
businesses are wary of public clouds’ quality of service in areas such
as reliability, availability, scalability and security but curious
about the possibility of adopting some of their characteristics such as
on demand scalability.
However to effectively reap the rewards of the cloud business will need to be able figure out how to mix and match:
- totally private and shared private clouds (to collaborate with partners on common goals)
- public and private clouds, with public clouds used, for example,
for workloads that have unpredictable spikes in their use, for
application that are only occasionally used or to turn the
pre-production infrastructure (used for test, migrations etc.) into
production one and use public clouds instead (since pre-production
tasks have much lower requirements in terms of quality of service than
production ones).
- Public clouds and traditional hosting/outsourcing service
offerings: for example hosted offerings are usually cheaper for static
web sites than the Amazon IaaS service. On the other hand, for use such
as application testing, where a handful of server is required for a few
weeks and a few hours per day, Amazon IaaS is the answer.
- Public clouds offerings (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), based on their respective cost effectiveness.
