Vendors must help with confusion over cloud computing

IT pros are apparently confused by the cloud, and the different ways IT services providers view it isn't helping.

By Miya Knights, 10 Aug 2009 at 12:42

“Amazon’s EC2 cloud is currently being used for development and staging environments,” he said. “But in the next three years or so we believe there’ll be a mix of public and private ‘clouds,’ where interoperability standards will become more key.”

So cloud could be infrastructure or software as a service, or it could be point-of-service with advertising, or be extra processing power or secure environments for scaling up or testing.

Open source future

If that doesn't help, it's not going to get any simpler in the future.

A recent development that points the way towards the route IT vendors are taking was the announcement that collaborative cloud computing research initiative Open Cirrus has expanded its membership, suggesting open source and interoperability might be the keywords of the future for cloud.

The initiative has been designed a ‘test-bed’ facility comprising six data-centre sites around the world, provided by its founding partners: HP Research Labs, Intel Research, Yahoo Research and the University of Illinois in the US, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and the Infocomm Development Authority in Singapore.

The initiative is using Amazon web services (AWS) is the standard interface, with Hadoop and MapReduce as the programming model for research projects on data-centre federation and management, integration of cloud services, management of service quality, and the protection of data integrity, privacy and security.

Ovum called on enterprise CIOs to start paying “attention to the evolving cloud research landscape, and perhaps it is time that we started to see large business corporations involving themselves in initiatives like Open Cirrus and the emerging debates on cloud standards,” it stated.

Big players

There are other big players to keep an eye on, too.

Infrastructure companies like IBM, EDS and Microsoft have all recently released their own frameworks and services to help manage the cloud.

But many of these, like Citrix Cloud Centre (C3), offer a portfolio of integrated delivery infrastructure virtualisation and network management products that are currently packaged and marketed to cloud service providers.

Managing the cloud

Once you've figured out what it means for you, managing cloud services is the next step.

One company that’s taken on the enterprise need to manage, control and secure their use of the cloud is service oriented architecture (SOA) vendor Tibco. In June it released a beta version of its application delivery platform for cloud computing, called Silver.

Tibco Silver provides container support for Java, C++ and Ruby with support for .NET and Spring that the vendor said would give an architect the flexibility to construct a composite application using services developed in various programming languages and deploy composite applications with minimal effort.

But John Eng, vice president of marketing for Parallels service provider division told IT PRO such products were responding to an emerging need: “While large enterprises may use public cloud services providers, internal IT resources are undergoing a transformation into private clouds from which services and applications are delivered to business units and departments in a highly flexible, scalable, and efficient manner.”

Eng said the cost and delivery challenges faced by IT departments today could be addressed through cloud computing, but only if the provisioning, delivery, and management of IT services is automated. “IT teams spend thousands of hours each year provisioning and decommissioning servers, containers and applications,” he added.

He said that, by using automation solutions, like those increasingly being developed by the likes of Parallels, enterprises would be able to automate these processes and free up significant amounts of time for the IT team to focus on delivering the desired service levels and implementing new services – and ultimately harness the benefits promised by cloud computing.

1 2

Email to a friend

Print this page

< Previous Server : Analysis & Insight Next >

3 comments

You need to Login or Register to comment.

Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing

For years the CIO has had to balance asset ownership with providing flexibility and innovation to the organisation. Enterprise cloud computing is now enabling that balance to tip in favour of cost-efficiency and innovation. From a service provider’s perspective, owning dynamically assignable assets in the form of infrastructure, data centres and especially network gives us clear long-term advantage. Customers can be sure their critical data and applications are secure in our data centres. Ownership of the network also allows us to provide end-to-end management capabilities second to none – and we can deliver customer-specific, relevant, end-to-end service level agreements. By offering reliability and high-end performance COLT’s services provide European businesses with a strong competitive advantage. We believe technology should be an enabler to success and should work seamlessly in the background to allow our customers to get on and do what they do best – run their business.

By Ip_philipphaberl on Wednesday Aug 19

Cloud Computing insecure and costly in mobility scenarios

Clound computing might be considered insecure since most companies consider all data without exception to be proprietry or subject to data protection legislation and outsourcing would essentially require that such data be stored offsite to comply with the concept where an outsourced solution is used. Many companies these days require a certain amount of portability and mobility, hence the use of laptops however to facilitate the use of cloud computing for these users would require costly mobile internet access links and potentially reduce mobility Cloud Computing may pander to the paranoic and control freak tendencies of senior management, but it would leave companies open to more serious security breaches by third parties, reduce the effectiveness of mobile staff struggling to work over restrictive internet links, and radically increase the operating costs to connect all the staff to the internet. It also implies a lack of trust towards staff and could inhibit creativity.

By Hitman101 on Wednesday Sep 9

Attractive Cloud

Cloud based application have been very useful and is progressing in the industry also well. Companies like this are exploring more and more on this : http://bygsoft.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/cloudy-combo-google-app-engine-and-amazon-s3-combo-pack/

By Leitner on Thursday Jan 21