This week, Gartner is holding a Data Center Conference in Vegas. A press release from this morning is on private vs. public cloud spend by IT organizations:
“Despite the economies of scale offered by public cloud providers, private cloud services will prevail for the foreseeable future while public cloud offerings mature, according to Gartner, Inc. Through 2012, IT organizations will spend more money on private cloud computing investments than on offerings from public cloud providers.
Gartner defines public cloud computing as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. Private cloud computing is defined as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to internal customers using Internet technologies.”
Compared dollars to dollars, this statement is pretty much a no-brainer. Private cloud computing requires investments in hardware, software and operations. Consuming public cloud computing offerings is essentially pay-as-you-go. I say essentially, because an organization may deploy licensed software to a public cloud computing environment (CCE), and may invest in application and software management tooling to facilitate/orchestrate cloud computing. Both models require process, and possibly, portfolio changes.
Aside from the dollar base comparison, I do agree with the sentiment of the release, that organizations will employ a hybrid (private-public CCE) adoption pattern.
““The hype of cloud computing is that existing IT architectures and processes can be simply replaced by the cloud," said Tom Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The reality of the future IT organization, however, is somewhat a combination. Larger enterprises will continue to have an IT organization that manages and deploys IT resources internally, some of which will be ‘private clouds.’ IT organizations will also take on IT service sourcing responsibility, determining when to leverage external providers, when to deploy internally, and when to leverage both for specific services.”
Private cloud services will be a stepping stone to future public cloud services and, over time, will span both private and public cloud resources in a hybrid manner. For many large enterprises, private cloud services will therefore be required for many years, perhaps decades, as public cloud offerings mature.
Gartner analysts said appropriate investments in private cloud computing will also make it easier for enterprises to gradually use public cloud services in the future. For services destined to be cloud at some point in time, enterprises should evaluate the return on investment from developing private cloud services, while waiting for external offerings to mature.
“Many of the investments in private cloud computing will prepare the enterprise for public cloud computing. These investments are not just technology changes — they are also process, cultural and business interface changes,” said Mr. Bittman. “Making these changes sooner rather than later will help enterprises to take better cloud sourcing decisions and potentially make for an easier transition to public cloud computing.””
The release continues with recommendations around organization models and a “three-point action plan for CIOs and infrastructure and operation leaders”. Read the release.
