Venyu Blog

From down under, (ok, Australia, to be literal), we have a report that says CSC, a global business solutions and technology services provider has, this week, launched in Australia a service it describes as a private cloud computing infrastructure which could be hosted in customers’ own data centers. The upshot of this service is to provide customers with an alternative for migrating to infrastructure-as-a-service platforms, e.g. cloud computing.

Now if we were to take the literal (there’s that word again) meaning of private cloud referring to a form of cloud computing that is: typically set apart from the infrastructure used by other users; consisting of highly virtualized storage and processing bundles; and typically hosted by large organizations in their own infrastructure or outsourced and managed by an external provider, then the CSC convention seems to work just fine.

However, the devil is in the details. As the author of the article points out — and what I find fascinating as a would-be  slight shift in the cloud computing paradigm — is that the service launched by CSC differs in that although it is based on a standard set of infrastructure from VMWare, the infrastructure itself is hosted on a customer’s own infrastructure.

Did you catch that? A private cloud operating on site within the customer’s own infrastructure that nominally serves (or, perhaps as CSC sees it), productively serves the needs of those customers who (a) either have some fears of sharing data over the cloud, (b) who want to “kick the virtual tires” of the public cloud to see if that configuration works for them.

In the article both outcomes are cited by CSC officials. “By offering this service, CSC has taken the work out of implementing a private cloud and overcomes the objections that security-conscious organizations usually raise around cloud adoption,” CSC said in a statement.

“Australian organizations have been uncertain about the move from traditional IT to the cloud. In an Australian first, customers can now take a safe first step to a preconfigured, integrated and tested private cloud on their own premises in just ten weeks,” said CSC Australia chief technology & innovation officer Bob Hayward.

As gleaned from this news and it’s altogether self-evident, the service appears to allow customers to migrate onto the on-premises private cloud model as a first step, before ultimately examining and presumably evaluating the case to shift work onto private cloud infrastructure located in CSC’s own facilities or even perhaps, ultimately, onto a public cloud.

Granted, there is a whiff of managed service going on here and to true cloud exponents, evangelists and other e-business constituencies the fact the “cloud” sits in the customer’s own data center is anathema, even heretical, to the concept of off-premise public computing. That said, it does seem that when you take away all of the nomenclature around the cloud that we here in North America have really gotten used to over the past couple of years, maybe even longer, on face value the CSC internal cloud framework appears an interesting and even provocative strategy for getting customers used to out of sight out of mind corporate data.

While there is undoubtedly an appetite for, as the author suggests, consuming data, storage and server resources by shifting their workloads into external providers’ clouds wholesale, there is also, undoubtedly, a similar reluctance to move data quickly into the cloud and hoping you can not only get it back when you need it, but in the same secure state in which it was transferred.

 Indeed, these cloud “tire kickers” — while probably not completely representative of enterprises that no longer fear the cloud and in fact have embraced it — is another segment of the IT population where seeing and trying it out for themselves before “buying it” and I think that when you really get down to it, there’s probably more of us out there than there is of them.