Who's Pushing For Private Clouds: Users or Vendors?

The entire "private cloud" concept was a vendor marketing concoction, but at the end of the day they are simply capitalizing on the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of the marketplace as the entire technology landscape changes on a scale never before seen. So in the end I don't know if anyone's really pushing for private clouds, they're just filling a gap until the cloud can reach the tipping point where conceptual barriers can be torn down and the true, ubiquitous form of the cloud replaces the private cloud training wheels and becomes the prevailing model.

I agree a little with Michael on this. However, there are too many issues with the Cloud Computing model that means it will not work for many business requirements and therefore for many businesses.

If we think of certain compliance issues that are raised, these wont go away with the current cloud model, so in this case, private cloud solutions are good options. I would therefore agree that Private Clouds plug the gap, however I dont see these as a temporary state or by any means training wheels, rather a solution to a problem. With this in mind I see this as a user lead thing, with vendors jumping on board becuase the demand is there (though I dont think you will see the likes of Google liking this)

I agree with @Michael that this started out as a vendor proposition and there is still quite a lot of "cloudwashing" going on there to make other vendor solutions look sexy.

But as I wrote a year ago, there is still the sticky question of what companies would do with the infrastructure they already own if they wanted to make a push to the Cloud. I thought that Cloud companies should provide rebates (a la cash-for-clunkers), but it looks like it will be an evolutionary process whereby companies move more to the public Cloud as they retire existing "private Cloud" infrastructure.

Of course there will always be companies that lag or don't adopt Cloud out of (mis-placed) concerns on security, compliance or other reasons. I say mis-placed because many of the same concerns can exist on internal or hosted infrastructure and as such are not specific to a Cloud strategy.

Many enterprise customers fear security and compliance issues with the public cloud. On the other hand they would like to increase the efficiency of their datacenters and are looking at standardization of resources, virtualization, automatic provisioning and workload optimization. This is really all about improving datacenter efficiency, but many people call this "private cloud". I do not agree that the private cloud is a vendor concoction. It is a name that has been given to an existing evolution of the datacenter. We actually used to call it "Next Generation datacenter", but today you NEED to call it cloud to get marketing traction.

We are seeing almost every customer ask if we can easily support a wide array of public cloud, private cloud, on premise, and hybrid models.

But I agree with Michael – if you dig deeper into the requirements that are driving customers to push for private clouds, you often find it ties back to an incomplete vision and confusion on how to make the move into a cloud-centric operating model.

For many customers the issue is perceived security, for others the issue is outdated legal models, and for others it is the SaaS vs. perpetual licensing dilemma.

From what I can see in the markets we operate in, vendors are also driving the private cloud model as a way to avoid building true cloud-enabled offerings. Take your classic perpetual product and spin it up on a virtual machine in the cloud and BAM! Instantly you have a cloud product. We all know this is not a scalable approach and really diminishes much of the value of designing and building on a true cloud platform.

Our response has been to design, build, and license our Microsoft Windows Azure-based cloud offerings to support all of these different models in order to best support our customers as they evolve and grow into the cloud.

Vendors might be "pushing" the concept, but I think there is a very strong user need they are catering to. There is strong apprehension, fear and skepticism about data flowing through a public network. At the same time, the benefits of cloud collaboration appeal to them. So in that sense, users are the ones push for private clouds.

> There is strong apprehension, fear and skepticism about data flowing through a public network.

Interesting comment. I presume these concerned individuals and organisations are not using email.

Most of the 'private clouds' I've heard people discussing are just internal infrastructure that takes advantage of virtualization and IT automation. Nothing wrong with that, but to me if it's not on the Internet, it's not a cloud. (Oh and if it is on the Internet, it needs cloud-scale security, that goes without saying).