The Myth of the “False Cloud”

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Private cloud is the “false cloud”? So say the titans of the public cloud.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff have both pronounced private cloud illegitimate—more stepchild than cousin to its now-famous public forbearer.

As Public Enemy protested, “Don’t believe the hype!”

Public cloud advocates like Vogels and Benioff have a direct stake in the failure of private cloud; as bellwethers for public sentiment, this makes them somewhat illegitimate in their own rights.

The reality is the private cloud is where enterprises are placing their initial bets. Sure, a private cloud can’t deliver the same cap ex relief and infinite scalability benefits of a public cloud. But it does deliver significant agility and cost benefits by removing the IT bottleneck and improving the utilization of capacity.

According to Vogels, private cloud ” … doesn’t have the right to be called a cloud model.”

I would contend that, as far as most IT leaders are concerned, it doesn’t much matter what it’s called. Feel free to call it Fred, Thing #2 or represent it as an unpronounceable symbol—the IT service formally known as cloud.

Just don’t suggest it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter, because I can assure you that the market sentiment does not favor this conclusion.

This is not to say that public cloud is somehow excluded from the enterprise cloud future. Ultimately, the next-generation data center will comprise a blended combination of internal and external; infrastructure, platform and application; physical, virtual and cloud resources.

As I’ve said before, the CIO will manage these resources as a portfolio, dynamically optimizing for price, performance and policy.

But private cloud is where most enterprises will start.

And that’s why the “false cloud” is little more than a slogan of biased origin.

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