Venyu Blog

As singer-songwriter Billy Joel crooned in his 1980’s hit, “It’s A Matter of Trust.”

That’s the distillation offered up by blogger David Linthicum in InfoWorld in commenting on a presentation on the dichotomy between public and private  cloud services by Gartner Group analyst Daryl Plumer during its recent IT Symposium in Orlando.

Turns out that Plumer’s advice—that enterprises should consider public cloud services first and turn to private clouds only if the public cloud fails to meet their needs — is predicated on the many potential benefits to deploying cloud services. Among these are business agility, reduced cost, reduced complexity, increased focus, increased innovation and being able to leverage the knowledge and skills of people outside the company.

While quick to praise these attributes Plumer explains there are a myriad of potential risks, including security, transparency, assurance, lock-in and integration issues. In terms of what applications to move to the cloud Plumer’s advice is to start at the edges and work your way to the core (e.g. email, social, test and development, productivity apps and web servers). In other words, what would hurt you the least if select data was rendered temporarily unavailable. 

Plummer also suggests that an accurate cost analysis is particularly tricky, since you’re weighing capital expenses versus recurring costs. He added that customers often underestimate their cloud usage costs, and most companies moving to the cloud will require the services of a cloud broker, which adds to the total tab.

As individual business units move into software as a service (SaaS) platforms and applications, it becomes a self-fulfilling outcome for the remainder of the organization to keep pace and join the rest of the organization in joining it. Monetarily speaking SaaS revenues, per Gartner, come in at $12 billion worldwide in 2011. Clearly, you can’t just put the genie back in the bottle.

But back to Linthicum. As a miner methodically works to expose a vein of silver I think he nails the real issue here: “The primary value of the cloud comes from the use of public clouds, mainly because you don’t have to purchase and maintain your own hardware and software. But this does require that you trust somebody else to deal with your infrastructure, applications, and development requirements. It might also mean you shut down a data center or two and reduce the size of your kingdom. Many in IT seem to have a real problem with doing that; when asked to move to the cloud, they choose the private option each and every time.”

Linthicum further advises “not to jump right to private clouds just because they solve the problem that IT has with letting go; public computing should be your first consideration and always with an eye on and conviction that your choice is driven by the business requirements and not cloud hype.”

Linthicum’s use of the term “letting go” reminds me, however obliquely, of Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan directing his young charge Luke (Skywalker) to “let go” of those things that were holding back his progress as a future Jedi Knight. A fantasy perhaps, but at its core a lesson for public cloud naysayers that’s worth revisiting.