Computer Weekly, March 2009
While private clouds offer significant benefits for risk-cautious businesses, Richard Hall, founder of cloud computing consultancy CloudOrigin and an experienced former corporate chief technology officer himself, believes the sheer economies of scale achieved by public cloud providers will inevitably mean they dominate in future.
“Although there may be some benefits looking at internal clouds, particularly as a sandbox to explore concepts, I suspect the real commercial benefits (savings on infrastructure and, unfortunately, headcount) will kick in only when an organisation moves to a major public cloud platform,” Hall says.
In 2009, the companies with most to gain from cloud computing will be industrial-scale users of infrastructure looking for major savings, or startups who never want to make heavy IT investments. Such companies should be looking at the architectural choices for cloud platforms with respect to software design and infrastructure deployment.
Many will actively trial technology and approaches this year, with a view to deployment into 2010 as the major platforms such as Windows Azure mature into production,” says Hall. “Then I think the first few snowflakes we are seeing now will turn into a full-blown avalanche,” he says.