Over the past couple weeks we have seen Rackspace acquire JungleDisk and Slicehost to counter Amazon S3 and EC2 as well as Microsoft’s announcement of their own Windows Cloud, Azure. My own company, EMC, has established a Cloud Division which houses the Pi and Mozy acquisitions. There are more annoucements coming in this area from EMC. What is interesting is how these Cloud Services are being rolled out to the general public.
There are two main camps developing around public versus private Clouds. EMC VMware is focusing on private Clouds and there is quite a few vendors out there deploying public cloud platforms. Given the evolution that VMware took, I would guess that private clouds will achieve higher adoption by large corporations in the near term. VMware had a lot of initial deployments in the Test/Dev environments of IT and as it proved its worth, those companies moved to apply virtualiztion to their production environments.
It is a logical extension to think big business will deploy clouds internally first to understand them and develop expertise and processes for managing these environments. The next couple of years’ economic outlook will most likely drive smaller companies to explore public cloud services. Large companies will have to research the public cloud offerings if for no other reason than checking the box for the higher ups asking for possible approaches to lowering IT spend. As we move into better times, the increase in adoption could be substantial.
Now, I’m not discounting the challenges…these public cloud offerings will have to overcome the perception of poor service levels (i.e. S3 and EC2 outages earlier this year). There is always the issue of security and performance but these will get worked out over time. A recent article about Drop.io’s exclusive use of cloud infrastrucuture gives some good perspective on the decision process they went through.
