Cloud is a Good Thing - Vendor Lock-in Is Not

I equate vendor lock-in to anti-cloud. The entire purpose and value proposition of cloud rests on it having dynamically defined borders. Such an open architecture requires, by nature, strong standards to facilitate the interchange of data, processes, and policies. However underscoring the lack of available expertise in the market and the willingness of leaders to attack without understanding, companies are moving headstrong with short-sighted tactics (I dare not call them strategies for the amount of thinking support the tactic is barely enough to call it more than a whim!). Companies are simply mortgaging their future for benefits today.

The landscape today is Private Cloud. I have yet to see interoperability standards proposed by or supported by a Private Cloud vendor, whether a software provider such as VMWare or a service provider such as Amazon. It was only a few years ago where the cost of virtualization software was so high it was cheaper to add physical servers. Adopting a proprietary platform today is likely not only to lead to higher overall costs, but solution isolation without the adoption of interoperability standards.

As is most often the case I believe it will fall to the open source world to define, build and adopt open standards. Xen came in to existence to duplicate VMWare without the high cost, bloat, and closed architecture. Look at what Amazon AWS has done with Xen! A full slate of tools of in development in the open source community along with improvements in open source operating systems which will subsume many of the capabilities paid for in VMWare, Hyper-V and other solutions today. What today is a service or software will become a component and foundation.

I'm not ready to short the stocks of EMC (VWWare's parent), Microsoft or Citrix (owner of Xen), but I'm watching closely!

Private Cloud is Not Just Infrastructure

I understand the push for Private Clouds. Major technologies incubate inside IT shops before they're moved to hosting providers and outsourcers. So it's no surprise to gain traction cloud needed it's internal equivalent and hence Private Cloud. The cynical side of me also recognizes that Private Cloud kowtows to the security wonks who see their jobs as preventing rather than enabling interactions. It also recognizes that no CIO wants to go to the CEO and explain the past several years investment in data centers now needs to be divested as everything moves to the cloud. As leaders continue to learn about the economics of public cloud and how they cannot, simply cannot be replicated in a Private Cloud, they've now started to reply "Hey, when I said Private Cloud I didn't mean it had to be in my data center. It could be outsourced." I understand it's hard to hit a moving target.

What everyone seems to be forgetting is that private cloud, like any cloud, is half infrastructure virtualization and process automation, and half application virtualization and process automation. A cloud does not exist with only one part. Yet reviewing the private cloud offerings of several software vendors such as VMWare and VCE show their definition is woefully short of a full cloud.

What about application service provisioning? What about the service discovery? What about service level management? What about session availability and continuity? None of these topics are covered by private cloud software vendors.

Where there is value, but it's more that "Private Cloud nesting underneath Public Cloud" flavor are the Private Cloud solution providers (CSC, Amazon ,etc.). They offer an entire stack, PaaS sitting on IaaS, on which one can deploy a private cloud.

A private cloud that only includes infrastructure is not private cloud; it's highly virtualized infrastructure. And sometimes it's not even highly virtualized...

Project Clouds

As the debate over the value of Public Clouds rages on (not sure why, but it does), companies are just now starting to see the immediate value of cloud computing. I realize that people who run IT are risk averse (which is why there is so little innovation coming out of IT), resistant to change (which is why things rarely get better), and rarely comprehend the technologies they oversee (I won't expound on this one). However they have one tremendous trait their predecessors did not: they understand the business. This viewpoint is starting to leak into the thinking about cloud computing and how to take advantage of it. Rather than focus on fighting the governance, security, ownership, ego wars of change, cloud computing can be applied to projects!

The real driver behind project clouds is speed to market. Things have to happen quickly to seize opportunities. Sun Tzu teaches one to assume whatever one is doing, their enemy is also doing, and therefore the winner is often determined by the one who achieves the objective first. I have found over my twenty years in IT and consulting that the larger the company, the longer simple tasks take in IT. Nowhere is this more evident than in the time it takes to provision environments, applications, and other technology tools for projects. Today the business cannot wait for IT to go through all their risk avoidance, cost containment, change preventing processes.

Every project needs its own set of tools from document sharing to issue tracking and often more specialized, project specific tools. My most recent example. We had our cloud based project management, issue tracking, document sharing, and prototyping solutions up and running in one day. It took over two months for IT to provision the sandbox and development environments. Worse, the environments were over 30days late on a three month development timeline. Real world differences like these point to the need for using cloud solutions. Pay-as-you-go, instant availability and scalability, what's not to like? Adopting the cloud is a risk avoidance technique, it's the lowest cost possible, and it requires IT to make no changes.

And security is no longer an excuse for sitting on the sidelines. With billions of dollars in transactions traversing public networks and clouds already we've proven that existing security solutions are adequate to the challenges of the cloud.

IT can either enable this process, or fight against it. However nobody should ever choose to stand in the way of progress; history has not been kind to those who have.