Computerworld Takes on Private Clouds

Some of you may have seen Computerworld’s story last week, “IT shops rally around private clouds.” SAS Institute, an early Platform ISF user, is also highlighted in the story for its innovative use of private clouds.

The article provides one of the most thorough assessments of how organizations are actually using private clouds I’ve seen, and hits on some of the key themes we have been talking about here at Platform since our launch of Platform ISF into beta back in June. With this in mind, I wanted to briefly recap the article’s themes, which I believe are fundamental in understanding the private cloud and are also key issues to keep in mind during implementations:

1. Private clouds address real business needs. Hall references research by Gartner, which concluded that by 2012, IT shops will spend more than half of their cloud investment on private clouds. These numbers reflect real needs within organizations to own and manage their compute resources internally.

2. Vendor lock-in must be avoided. In the story, Hall poignantly notes that, “For the most part, CIOs abhor vendor lock-in. Reliance on a single vendor can be costly and can keep a company from making necessary infrastructure changes.” This is something we recognized early here at Platform, which is why we introduced a heterogeneous cloud management solution to the marketplace with Platform ISF. I believe the concern over vendor lock-in will only continue to grow as more companies experiment with private clouds.

3. Tools to manage private cloud are critical. One of our CEO Songnian Zhou’s favorite phrases is “clouds are built, not bought.” Building a cloud requires tools to efficiently managing all the various components, also making management crucial for the success of private cloud implementations.