Thomas J. BittmanAlmost all large companies and many small and midsized enterprises are virtualizing. Based on surveys, the majority of large companies consider building a private cloud a core strategy. Surprisingly, that’s even true with midsized organizations – but slow down a bit. While the direction makes sense, be careful about getting too caught up in the hype of building a perfect private cloud. A cloud service requires a self-service (or non-manual) interface, and some form of usage metering, or even chargeback. Behind the interface, the services are delivered automatically on demand.
The fact is, not every IT organization needs a fully self-service interface, and many smaller organizations see no value in usage metering. They simply want to deliver services faster. For them, a 70% private cloud is absolutely good enough.
There is still value in virtualizing your resources, automating how the resources are allocated to meet demand, automating provisioning based on standard service offerings in a published service catalog. But you may want a person in the middle of the process. Or you may want to route the pure self-service requirements to your favorite external cloud provider rather than build your own. And that’s OK. It all comes down to business requirements, return on investment, and future strategy (including the potential to evolve to external cloud providers in the future). How far you go is your decision.
So while most enterprises may consider private cloud their goal, and vendor hype is going to skyrocket on how to reach that goal – my bet is that most organizations will find that a less than pure private cloud is going to be good enough.
Category: Cloud Virtualization Tags: cloud computing, private cloud, Virtualization
5 responses so far ↓
1 uberVU - social comments March 13, 2010 at 7:12 pm
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by tombitt: Imperfect private clouds OK http://blogs.gartner.com/thomas_bittman/2010/03/13/driving-for-imperfection-with-your-private-cloud/...
2 In Cloud, ITIL, and SOE – Heterogeneity is the New Standard | Andi Mann – Übergeek March 15, 2010 at 2:44 pm
[...] via Driving for Imperfection With Your Private Cloud. [...]
3 Pankaj March 15, 2010 at 3:11 pm
There is always a hype around any new innovation which is adapted by the biggies of the stature of Microsoft, Google etc. Authors over hype or over critic such a trend. Private cloud is an interesting trend though it should be adopted only after a detailed analysis has been done !
4 Jay Fry March 15, 2010 at 9:22 pm
As vendors it can be easy to get caught up in the hype around private clouds, but, Tom, I think your message for customers is right: do what makes sense for your org. Even if that messes up some peoples’ definition of what a cloud is and/or should be. The reality is that you might actually help a lot of other end users see a very useful approach. Not to mention help your own org in the exact way that’s needed.
5 Cloud Computing in the Public Sector | Andi Mann – Übergeek May 27, 2010 at 2:35 pm
[...] So while cloud must be increasingly evaluated, actual cloud adoption must be justified by “demonstrable benefits” that improve IT service delivery, not just reduce costs. As I have stated in EMA research and blogged about here, it is important for enterprises (public or private) to “look for opportunities, and do what makes sense” when it comes to cloud computing. This is reflected by thought-leaders like Gartner’s Thomas Bittman (@tombitt), who explains that for some organizations “a 70% private cloud is absolutely good enough.” [...]
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