Private cloud. What cloud service providers are doing sounds awfully attractive to enterprises. With homogenous hardware, data center automation, and effective virtualization management, one admin can run a magnitude more servers. Plus, the chargeback and self-service functions of commercial services can be applied to inside-the-firewall services -- from email to business intelligence to dev and test infrastructure -- improving cost allocation and reducing overhead. The "private cloud" refers to enterprise adoption of such cloud service architecture and technology.
The benefit of the private cloud is that you get all the scalability, metering, and time-to-market benefits of a public cloud service without ceding control, security, and recurring costs to a service provider. But that sort of scale tends to work with one large application or service at a time. No one expects enterprises to turn their architectures upside down and adopt cloud services across the board.
Nor, of course, does anyone expect wholesale adoption of public cloud services to replace major chunks of internal IT -- at least, not right away. Recent developments, such as the limited beta release of Microsoft Office 365, indicate that the software industry is dead serious about getting into cloud services. And the cloud service providers, from NetSuite to Teradata, keep making significant inroads. On both public and private fronts, cloud computing isn't going away. In fact, adoption seems to be accelerating faster than many had anticipated.
This article, "InfoWorld launches cloud computing iGuide," originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr's Modernizing IT blog and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter and on your mobile device at infoworldmobile.com.