DocAndersen
The explosion that is a hybrid cloud is interesting to me. In part because the underlying reality is we skipped broker for hybrid but effectively made hybrid broker. The reality is cloud broker came out roughly 3 or 4 years ago and was met with a tepid response.
Automation is the hallmark of value in cloud computing. The Cloud Service Providers work hard to automate the delivery of the Infrastructure and provide it as a service. (What is called IaaS). Organizations work hard to automate the infrastructure they deploy on the automated infrastructure of the cloud service provider (that is the automation of what was once called the broker).
The value of cloud is automation. The reality of cost savings over time in the cloud is true automation. Where you take the reality of what you have, match it to the reality of what you want to have and then begin a very hard look at what it is you have now.
That is where organizations miss the boat. Now, in part, there are some players on the field. In fact, if we were to make this a football analogy (either global football or US football) there are still too many players on the field for a proper game.
Unless…
In the original NIST cloud publication, there is a little tiny process called portability that offers the organizational freedom from cost increases. Your cloud increases in cost, move to a new one. Want to avoid the cost of vendor lock-in, move to a new cloud. (what’s that you say Bucky, there is no such thing as Vendor Lockin in the cloud world? hmmm. The rest of the cloud expert culture would tell you that in fact there is lock-in).
Portability – ability to move between two clouds without impact to your running solution. You could, do this today but it is painful. The drivers for one public cloud are not the drivers of the next public cloud. The four big players aren’t incented to allow you to easily move your solution. That would be the commoditization of their services, good for the business of the world, bad for public cloud providers.
The future of cloud computing is at huge crossroads right now. We’ve built the hybrid solutions. We could argue that we took what was Cloud Broker 1.0 and crammed it into what we call the Hybrid Cloud solution. What we don’t have is the tools today that would let us look at an application and tell you, where you could improve the application (with a tweak, not a major rewrite) and have it be a better application overall.
Application assessments, value driven computing, cloud solutions designed to support the organization, sounds like Nirvana to me…
The ‘cloud’ is intriguing. I feel we may be running before we walk though. We still cannot secure traditional ‘storage’ media, so how do we expect to make the ‘cloud’ 100% secure.
I think there is a distinct difference there. We have structure and process around cloud service providers that gives us the ability to implement pure security. We don’t have that with the home user therefore, storage is often at risk.
I guess, when you have pros, you get professional service.
Even some pros mess up. Look at all the leaked celebrity photos – they were stored in ‘professional’ cloud servers. But not all cloud servers are the same – and you do note that ‘portability’ is key.
Portability is critical, it is however critical to note that most of the hacked celebrity photos were directly from their phones, not a cloud service per se. That was less the security of the cloud service and more the reality of end user security…