AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Getting Ready for Cloud Computing
IBM's new announcement around its Blue Cloud offerings is an example of a vendor who is struggling to re-work its existing products into the cloud and provide new services on top of them, to capitalize on the market buzz.
As stated in this article by John Brodkin for Network World, IBM had been accused of "Cloud washing" its existing offerings under the guise of an integrated private cloud offering set. IDC stated that this was a remapping of existing technologies into the cloud.
However a remapping of existing technologies in the infrastructure is exactly what corporations need as their first step to the Cloud. Today, there are really no new technologies that enable true Cloud Computing – it’s yet to be seen whether IBM’s new technologies will truly be "the industry's first set of 'cloud' services and integrated products for the enterprise."
For nearly all enterprises today it is a matter of taking steps with existing technologies to move a company closer to the Cloud. Existing technologies that will put companies on the right path to Cloud Computing include Virtualization, Web 2.0 enablement platforms such as Websphere, and the management and monitoring platforms which keep them running. Virtual desktop environments are also a stepping stone into the cloud, allowing employees to work from anywhere across any network, securely. Isn’t that the true value of the cloud?
As we have stated in the past, companies should take steps to ready their infrastructure for a true cloud environment. It will not be enough to buy technology and implement it. Great thought will need to go into the mapping of existing business driving solutions into a cloud environment to make it successful. At the end of the day the bulk of the useful clouds will be hybrid -- taking a little from the public, and private sides in conjunction with existing internal infrastructure.
