Many vendors are pressing for a move to the cloud and many enterprises prefer the private cloud models,
In practise it seems that IT is struggling to deliver. with a majority of private cloud pilots not going well.
Technology, can be improved but the major factors that are cause private cloud projects to falter are non-technical factors similar to those that affect other projects like erp implementation.
1.Success metrics – most private cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts are focused almost exclusively on technical validation. While the IT team proves to itself that it can deploy a private cloud, users and developers are measuring it against services already available in the market. Failing to demonstrate a better services value proposition will not build internal momentum. Pilots need to include business success metrics as well as technical.
2.Inertia – so why aren’t the metrics defined correctly? Because in many cases enterprise IT just sees cloud in a fundamentally different light. As noted in posts by James Staten at Forrester and Giri Fox at Rightscale, enterprise IT tends to see cloud as the next logical step in the evolution of infrastructure and virtualization. The focus is on demonstrating robustness, stability and change control, the enterprise IT comfort zone. The factors that business users really care about like usability and provisioning time are not the proejct drivers.
3.Lack of vision – CIOs have to answer the long-term question of where they’re best positioned to compete for business budget dollars, and whether it really makes sense for IT to be in the IaaS business. Without a clear ITaaS vision, it’s hard for business users and developers to get excited about internally provided services they believe they can get from Amazon, Rackspace, Google or Microsoft today. IT’s vision may be to provide hybrid or “multi-cloud” environments, but can they articulate what that means and why business users should care.
4.Motivation and commitment – Private clouds seem like a good way for IT to come up the cloud learning curve while leveraging existing hardware and infrastructure and to show that “we’re doing something with cloud”. Is enterprise IT fully up to the paradigm shift brought about by cloud?,
A CIO’s private cloud competes in the market against AWS and others. While security, compliance and performance factors may enable IT maintain their internal “monopoly” through mandated use of private clouds, they have the burden of proof.
The arguments in favour of Private clouds vs Public clouds altered signifcantly in June. Te Obama administration found itself embroiled in another pair of scandals. First, The Guardian reported that the NSA has been collecting the call records of millions of Verizon customers (later reports say that AT&T and Sprint Nextel are also involved). Second The Washington Post reported that “the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.” The result of these revelations was deep discussion throughout the traditional media, blogosphere, and other social media about the desired limits of government power to intercept and analyze private communications. Whatever your opinion on the politics and civil liberties issues, one thing is for sure — the revelations about the PRISM program are going to change the way people look at public clouds.
As for public versus private cloud, does it matter where the data resides?. If the government asks for the data and has a court order, even data that resides on a private cloud needs to be provided. Of course, having data in different countries “may” enable corporations to avoid being hauled to court by the US government.. So the question of absolute data privacy does not exist. It is the same with all governments around the world. If they think their country is at danger, the government in charge has an obligation to do everything to protect its citizens. As such, it do not see how PRISM program should or will impact the design to go private or public cloud. The question is rather, where should your data reside if you do not want the US government to have access to it. I would say, there are very few countries in the world where this “may” be possible. But then, do you really want your data to reside in those countries?
