This Week in the Cloud: Private Cloud Pain and Saving Money (and the Environment) with the Public Cloud
Dreamforce may be right around the corner, but before Benioff and Metallica dominate the news cycle, here’s a look at this week’s cloud news stories:
Pain in the Private Cloud
SearchCloudComputing.com’s Carl Brooks wrote an interesting post earlier this week about how two IT vendors reworked their own internal IT departments — and quickly learned the problems and confusion inherent with private cloud architecture. GreenPages and CA Technologies both dropped massive money and resource investments to develop their own private cloud infrastructures. In the end, though, the switch only caused a lot of headaches.
And these are two of the largest IT vendors in the industry. Imagine the problems smaller mom and pop shops would face in developing their own private clouds. As Brooks writes, “These guys are the canaries in the coal mine for what enterprise IT will have to go.”
The moral of the story? The best cloud is the public, not private, cloud.
Cloud Brokerages
Real-time bidding is a huge trend in the tech world these days, and a new Forrester report predicts the practice will soon invade cloud computing. GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham wrote about the Forrester report, which predicts that by the beginning of 2012, businesses will exist that aggregate private and public cloud resources, and offer them for sale on automated, RTB marketplaces.
All signs point to further cloud adoption in the enterprise…
The Cloud Can Save Money…and The Environment
The cloud is more than just a great way for companies to trim IT costs. As Ellen Gilmer writes in the New York Times, “Now companies, environmentalists and consumers find themselves struggling with a new question: How do you measure the carbon footprint of a ‘cloud’?”
The same off-site data centers that house companies’ systems offsite are saving not only money, but also the earth. These centers consolidate servers in a single location and run fast, powerful machines, which trim both server maintenance costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
From Microsoft to Google – Benefits of Cloud Adoption
ComputerWorldUK ran an interesting interview with Michael O’Brien, the CIO of Journal Communications, about why he made the switch from Microsoft to Google Apps when he took over the company’s IT operation in May 2010. At first, the organization – and even O’Brien himself – was reticent about making the switch, but projected time and money savings, coupled with an email server failure, had employees lining up to make the switch to Google.