Tag Archive for 'private cloud'

The rise of hybrid clouds

By Olafur Ingthorsson on January 7, 2010 in Cloud Computing. 2 Comments

It seems that many analysts, e.g. at the Cloud Computing Journal, are proclaiming that private and hybrid clouds will see a real proliferation in 2010. Security concerns of public clouds are still prevailing and many IT professionals and managers are still very reluctant to the idea of migrating private enterprise data and operations to a public cloud provider. Deploying cloud computing on-premise, in a private cloud fashion, is seen as a way to exploit many of the benefits from cloud computing, i.e. automation, centralization and elasticity, without the security risks still lurking around in public clouds. In private clouds, organizations maintain closer security and compliance controls over their applications and data. In the longer term though, together with increased cloud adoption, managers will probably compare more seriously the cost/benefit analysis of private versus public clouds.

Alternatively, hybrid clouds, seem as a sensible intermediary step between public and private clouds, enabling organizations to leverage  upon both worlds – combining on-demand capacity with in-house compliance.
Implementing a hybrid cloud strategy is simply an attempt to augment a private cloud with the resources of a public cloud in order to maintain acceptable service levels despite spikes in demand, i.e. to address and prevent the so called Cloudbursting (“the failure of a cloud computing environment due to the inability to handle spike in demand”).
Hybrid clouds seem a natural step for enterprises not interested or willing to migrate resources to the public cloud due to security vulnerabilities or otherwise. Getting their feet wet in the cloud without risking too much, hybrids clouds may offer a beneficial alternative for dealing with temporary spikes in demand, lowering capital costs and offer the elasticity desired.

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2010 – the year of cloud computing catastrophes?

By Olafur Ingthorsson on January 3, 2010 in Cloud Computing. 8 Comments

As more companies offer cloud computing services and the number of users increase, statistics tell us that the likelihood of a serious problem occurring, for example, somewhere in the  transfer network or in different security segments, increases. We have already seen some serious ‘outages’ in the past, such at Magnolia, the social bookmarking site that crashed and lost all its data earlier this year. Will 2010 be the year of some disastrous encounters for cloud computing?

Some analysts are predicting 2010 to be the year of catastrophes for cloud computing, including the CEO of Strategic News Service, Mark Anderson, in an interview with BusinessWeek. He believes that the increasing reliability toward cloud services could actually backfire in the form of a serious service outage or security based catastrophe. And, the disaster could be big enough to question the dependability of cloud services by corporations in particular.

My believe it that although we might possibly see some serious outages or security breaches encounter, the long-term benefit of network delivered services will outweigh the risks of organisations continue to deploy and migrate to cloud based services. Clearly, organisations and IT managers must carefully select the right type of resources or applications to transfer to the cloud with regard to their mission-critical nature and sensitivity. If using a public cloud provider seems too risky in terms of security or availability, another option would be to migrate to a private (or hybrid) cloud.

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