Locaweb Blog

Forrester’s James Staten in a November 15th article making predictions for the Cloud Computing market (most notably from a IaaS point of view) states something that sound interesting to companies considering setting up their own private cloud structure.

He states that hosted private clouds will outnumber internal clouds 3:1 because they are the fastest and easiest way for companies to gain the benefits of a private cloud with the speed of a public cloud arrangement. The rationale is that companies that want to get the economies of scale of a cloud arrangement securely will not be ready to deploy their private clouds internally, while service providers will. In another prediction, he states: “You will build a private cloud, and it will fail. And this is a good thing. Because through this failure you will learn what it really takes to operate a cloud environment.”

This is very true – setting up a cloud infrastructure is time consuming and requires big investments. Worse yet, the biggest investments are CapEx, when companies are trying to free up resources for OpEx. But that is not the whole story. The reasons for choosing a private cloud over a public one may be mistaken to begin with.

Staten cites a Forrester research paper that compares cloud computing platforms that divides cloud implementations into 3 groups: Public clouds, private clouds, and hosted private clouds. The main advantage of using a public cloud, according to him would be to leverage the economies of scale of cloud computing in the fastest, cheapest way. Private clouds, on the other hand, would trade of most of those economies for increased control and security. The hosted private cloud solution would, as one would expect, be an intermediate solution.

However, public clouds already offer solutions that make those arguments thinner and less relevant. VLANs connecting groups of virtual machines and Firewalls isolating them from the rest of the cloud infrastructure make public cloud server solutions practically as safe as their private counterparts, without the added costs and complexity. IT personnel can easily rely on that kind of solution to tap into the power of cloud computing without having to put together their own cloud setup and without having to resort to any kind of private cloud, even hosted. Private clouds are necessarily more costly that public ones, and as Staten himself puts it, 2011 will be the year companies will be eager to start reaping the economic benefits of going to the cloud.

My own prediction is that 2011 will be the year that cloud SLA and security worries will stop being an impediment to the adoption of IaaS. The worries are valid, no doubt, but the solutions are already here and the providers are already implementing them. It is certainly the case in our own Cloud Server Pro products and will certainly continue to be the case as we move forward with our cloud computing offerings.