Your Private Cloud
- All the apps you want so you can do everything from anywhere
- As much data as you can accumulate
- Perfection by subscription
- It never breaks and you can’t outgrow it
- Get it all for just $1
Yeah, right.
Hype? You bet it can be. According to Gartner research, private cloud computing has moved into the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. This comes from the Gartner 2011 Hype Cycle Special Report, which offers assessments of the “maturity, business benefit and future direction of over 1,900 technologies”. The entries are grouped into 76 different “Hype Cycles”, revealing the similar patterns of “over-enthusiasm, disillusionment, and eventual realism” that comes with every new technology or innovation.
The purpose of the report is to provide guidance to business IT decision makers, providing information on when businesses should consider adoption of a technology or IT model in order to achieve the maximum potential value.
Part of the problem is the confusion in the market, where there are multitudes of definitions being offered for cloud computing models. Different service providers offer their solutions with varying levels of service and capability, so there is really no way to compare one Private Cloud service to another.
Another part of the problem is expectation, or the belief that cloud computing technologies are somehow different from “real” technologies, and are consequently not subject to the same potential for breakage, failure, or cost. Even though Amazon may use the term “elastic”, cloud computing does not automatically create a stretchy and eternally-dynamic resource that can grow without end. There are still limitations, and costs associated with growth.
Applications that are poorly designed and buggy on your local computer or network are going to be buggy in the cloud. Even applications that are completely re-designed to run via the Web don’t come with a guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. You simply may not notice it so much, if you have a provider working behind the scenes to keep things running as well as possible, but the introduction of interconnections in your system isn’t going to magically change the way the software runs, especially if it’s bad software.
A private cloud, for many businesses, simply means that service has been customized for the unique needs of the organization, rather than utilizing generic or standardized solutions. Private clouds may also mean simply that the business is not working on servers or other system elements shared by other businesses, and that they have hardware or other resources dedicated exclusively to their use. Or, a private cloud may mean that the system elements are all contained within the business infrastructure, providing “cloud” type of services but being delivered from company resources.
The thing for businesses to do now is to just ignore the term “cloud”, and simply consider how your business might leverage resources from service providers to gain more IT capability at a reduced cost. Centralized management, improved security, disaster recovery, and increased mobility are all benefits of working with hosted application and managed service models. Outsourced IT service isn’t a new concept, and using common sense when engaging for 3rd party services is still necessary. Avoid the hype: If it sounds too good to be true… it probably is. Technology hasn’t come that far.
Make sense?
- Get information on Running QuickBooks in the Cloud at www.cpaasp.com
