Lately, my big question for IT professionals is: do you really care about private, public or Inter-Cloud right now? I'm sure you understand what private and public clouds are, so what is Inter-Cloud? Inter-Cloud is a new term coined by Cisco and it's defined by Cisco as "Bringing Cloud Providers together and allowing them to inter connect each other; this creates a Inter-Cloud." Here is a link to a Cisco video about this vision recorded in December 2008. Recently Cisco started promoting this term and Inter-Cloud Vision to bloggers, analysts and media around last December and early January this year. If you are following David Smith's blog at Gartner you must have noticed an interesting blog conversation between David and James Urquhart. To really understand Cisco's vision you have to read this comment posted by James Urquhat at David's Blog:
"At some point in the not horribly distant future, some service providers will offer 'virtual private cloud' services to allow 'private clouds' to consume resources in the service provider infrastructure, while maintaining the illusion of being a part of the customer's private cloud. This is simply extending 'intranets' to consume services over the Internet without exposing the content to the general public-kind of like VPN? (Not a perfect analogy, to be sure.)"
The network technology to enable the linkage of enterprises to all forms of public cloud offerings (not just virtual private clouds) in a way that takes the unique nature of cloud computing and running IT workloads in mind is called 'cloud internetworking.'"In "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Inter-Cloud," Cisco's vision for Inter-Cloud is a federation of clouds based on open standards: Naming/Discovery, Trust and Exchange/Peerings. I hope we will hear from Cisco on open standards from a networking and infrastructure perspective soon. Recently at ebizQ we posted the question "Who should define standards for Cloud" in our Forum. Avigdor Luttinger of Magic Software, Phil Wainewright and Matt Shanahan posted some very good comments.
"I tend to think of the Cloud as an aggregation of technologies and practices, not as some kind of a monolithic entity. Standards exist already for many Cloud elements, and new elements will get standardized as the existing ones were, depending on their adoption level and technical complexity. Just let it be, and the stakes will do their work."
"The cloud market is too new for a committee members to have common, credible experience on what is really required."
"What's important right now is to fuel innovation around interoperability so that customers have lots of options to choose from. Then the best solutions will rise to the top."Cloud Market is new, and maybe in few years from now if these terms become popular, I might be writing this blog entry using Google Docs from a private cloud. If you've got some questions or suggestions please let me know, by leaving a comment here.
Interesting thoughts, Prakash. There is a vendor that already does provide technology to enable 'virtual private clouds' called CohesiveFT, with a product called VPNcubed:
http://www.cohesiveft.com/vpncubed/
There is a lot of this 'cloud middleware' emerging, and it meets a very real need among enterprises for better control and visibility of their cloud-hosted resources.
Thanks Phil, I will check CohesiveFT out. Also would love to see your thoughts on McKinsey 's report on Cloud Computing.
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