This Week in the Cloud: The Cloud Hits Mars; More on the Public/Private Debate

Here’s our roundup of the week’s biggest cloud stories:

Private Clouds Just Aren’t Worth the Trouble

InformationWeek’s Jonathan Feldman wrote some spot-on analysis last weekend explaining why the private cloud is just not practical for most businesses. In Feldman’s view, implementation snags are the crux of the problem. He writes: “There's complexity underneath public cloud services, but it's not your complexity. It's the service provider's. And chances are your service provider is way more situated to handle that complexity because of (and I know this is a tired old phrase when it comes to the cloud, but it's true) economies of scale.”

That about sums it up. The public cloud is just more practical for most organizations, freeing customers to focus on their businesses, not basic infrastructure maintenance and making sure custom-built systems play together nicely.

‘Consumerization of IT’ -- More than iPads and Smartphones

ComputerWorld’s Bernard Golden writes this week about the oft-overused “consumerization of IT” phrase, and what the trend really means for IT. Golden’s correct in that it’s more than just employees brining their own mobile devices to work. Instead, the cloud and this new generation of devices are fundamentally changing how companies conduct their business. Management, of course, is essential. IT must be empowered to lead an organization through this transition, whether authenticating mobile devices or effectively managing access to the public cloud apps they run.

Amazon Exec on the Cloud Revolution

Speaking at the NASA IT Summit earlier this week, Andy Jassy, SVP at Amazon Web Services, made his case for IT’s future in the cloud. Perhaps that’s to be expected as AWS is more than a little biased toward the cloud. But, according to SPACE.com’s Mike Wall, Jassy has some pretty reputable support: NASA. The rocket scientists behind NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are huge cloud proponents, using it to power NASA’s next mission to Mars. Talk about scalability …