“The industry is moving from the early adopter stage to a mainstream form. We see cloud adoption rising rapidly, both in public and private and we see many different adoption patterns, not just one or another since there is not one single model that covers everything,” says Wang. “Businesses want the freedom to make their choices and to even change their mind.”
Companies must consider business criticality of the applications they want to move to the cloud, regulatory issues, required service levels, usage patterns for the workloads and how integrated the application must be with other enterprise functions. But regardless of which model an organization selects after evaluating how to best implement cloud, they are going to make certain trade-offs in either direction.
“What’s great about public cloud is it’s a form of outsourcing. There is a tradeoff between the control you get in private cloud versus the visibility you get with in a public cloud. If it involves integration with your own data center, it’s made easier in a private model,” explains Wang, who says there is currently a wider-spread adoption of private clouds.
With the public cloud, companies are paying for the service as an operating expense, whereas with the private cloud organizations are encumbering both capital expenses and OPEX.
“It’s like buying versus renting a house. The idea that public clouds are always cheaper is a myth if that enterprise has sufficient economies of scale. If they have sufficient scale, private clouds can be cheaper at some point during the breakeven period,” says Wang.
A public cloud can gives companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses, the flexibility they need – but they surrender direct control, according to Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing at Infoblox (News - Alert).
“I don’t have to build it, I can try it. It is that utility mindset. All I really need to do is how to manage that SLA,” says Garrison. “But if I ask for a change, how fast does that happen? The real reason why everybody wants to try public cloud is that it means no CAPEX averted. Because you aren’t building it you are just treating it like a utility, and I am writing a check every month to pay for it,” adds Garrison,a notion that comes with the drawback of not fully understanding what’s happening behind the scenes.
“When I don’t build it, I don’t learn it. I don’t know what’s going on under the hood,” he says.
Another so-called tradeoff is security. The term “cloud security” may sound like an oxymoron. Certainly, we know that cloud computing is imposing change to IT strategies, but is security a real or perceived threat in the cloud, and does a private cloud mean better security?
“There’s perceived differences at least about the security around private and public cloud. It’s a hotly-debated topic, one that is perception-based,” maintains Wang.“In a private cloud, an organization has control of and perhaps greater confidence in security. In a public cloud you are entrusting someone else controlling that for you. There is a basic tradeoff between private and public. We see people adopting both on a case-by-case basis. Organizations are making the decision based on ‘should I put this in my private or public cloud.’ So it’s not a question of which, it’s a question of both.”
In further breaking down the concept of security, there are three core issues that are intertwined, according to Wang: 1) Data loss or unauthorized access because of an attack; 2) privacy and the idea of isolating customer data from neighboring customer data from one tenant to another tenant; and 3) regulatory issues that dictate where data must reside.
“First the technology itself needs to be secure. Next, the data centers themselves that house the technology has to be secure. There is also the physical security of the data itself,” explains Wang.
“Some industries are more sensitive to regulatory issues or are simply more conservative, so they may have a preference for private clouds. They have the resources, the scale and the structure to move in this direction,” Wang concludes. “As far as public clouds – today there are a lot of them and they are quite popular. Public clouds tend to offer one thing and they do it particularly well – it’s a standardized offering.”
Hybrid: The Best of Both Worlds?
As cloud computing matures, the term “hybrid” has taken on an ambiguous connotation – but in its fundamental form, a hybrid model draws on the resources of both public and private clouds. Hybrid clouds can meandifferent things to different people, explains Wang, as there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all cloud solution.
With hybrid, there is reference to“cloud bursting,” a type of overdraft protection, which allows businesses to move their workloads from private to public cloud, or from within their own data center into the cloud. There is also hybrid across the application lifecycle, which means organizations might do tests in one cloud and might do deployments in another cloud. Another definition of hybrid is one that is used across a business process.
“It’s a little bit like integration across clouds in that you are putting one business process in one cloud, and another part in another cloud,” Wang explains.
In the recent report, “Hybrid IT: How Internal and External Cloud Services are Transforming IT,” Gartner states that although businesses have adopted public cloud services for non-critical applications, they are still using internal IT functions for core capabilities.
“IT organizations are taking an ‘adopt and go’ strategy to satisfy internal customer IT consumerization and democratization requirements,” says Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner.
“Many IT organizations are adopting public cloud computing for non-critical IT services such as development and test applications, or for turnkey software as a service (SaaS (News
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