Bernard Golden

Last week I wrote about the fact that IT organizations are now executing an "and" cloud computing strategy, in the sense that their future plans include (most likely) an internal cloud based on VMware and an external cloud (most likely Amazon Web Services).

I pointed out that the traditional model of managing virtual machines--creating a VM template that contains all the software components that the VM contains--is inappropriate in a world in which applications may be deployed internally, externally, across both internal and external clouds, and even transferred between internal and external clouds. This is due to the fact that the virtual machine images are typically incompatible across deployment environments.

Over the past year, I've noticed a significant shift in my conversations about cloud with senior IT managers.

A year ago, when discussing an organization's cloud strategy, I heard a consistent theme that "our focus is on creating a private cloud." Sometimes stated, sometimes unstated or sometimes said under an executive's breath was the objective of curtailing developer use of public cloud computing. The target of that objective most commonly was Amazon Web Services.

Virtualization represents a sea change in IT practices. Bound for years by the "one application, one server" rule, IT infrastructure was over capacity, underused and not cost-effective.

With the advent of virtualization and the associated move to hosting multiple virtual machines on a single server, many of these problems disappeared.

I had the privilege of chairing the infrastructure track at last week's Cloud Connect conference. Three of the presentations were particularly interesting, offering a good perspective on just how dramatic an effect cloud computing is having on IT. Summed up, the capability and agility of cloud computing is forcing an extremely rapid evolution.

In a sense, these effects are akin to what would happen to an established living ecosystem were significant change to occur within. One could expect to see existing species be stressed by the development of new characteristics in the ecosystem, forcing them to adapt rapidly to survive. Those that fail to adapt will, inevitably, dwindle into extinction.

I don't know how I missed this, but at the Gartner IT Symposium in October, Darryl Plummer (Chief of Gartner Cloud Research) apparently stated that enterprises should deploy applications in a public cloud provider as a default, and only deploy them in a private cloud if the public alternative is not appropriate.

I became aware of Plummer's recommendation, which caused quite a stir in the blog world when he first announced it, via Twitter earlier this week.

I was interested in this week's ZDNet piece, Cloud computing's real creative destruction may be the IT workforce. The piece discusses a presentation at last week's Gartner Symposium that posited cloud computing will be a net destructor of IT jobs.

I am not one to gainsay Gartner's wisdom. In fact, earlier this year I wrote about the topic of job losses and cloud computing in a post titled Cloud CIO: Yes, Your Job Is At Risk." The topic seems to be in the air: Another blog I came across this week was titled, I'll Probably Never Hire Another Pure SysAdmin"

IT is in a time of disruptive transition, caused by the rise of cloud computing. CIOs are in the midst of a maelstrom, and--like Ulysses, the fabled hero from Homer's Odyssey--are torn between the Scylla of established IT practices and the Charybdis of the future, both of which loom dangerously and portend trouble. Also like Ulysses, many CIOs must inure themselves to the din of tempting Sirens: the vendors who sing a sweet song of painless cloud transformation, made possible by the purchase of some software, or hardware, or a set of cloud services.

One can predict that, CIOs, like Ulysses, will eventually pass into calm waters--the future in which new processes and products will replace the legacy activities that make up today's IT world. The shorthand term for these new entities is cloud computing.

One of the topics most associated with cloud computing is its cost advantages, or lack thereof. One way the topic gets discussed is "capex vs. opex," a simple formulation, but one fraught with meaning.

At its simplest, capex vs. opex is how compute resource is paid for by the consumer of those resources. For example, if one uses Amazon Web Services, payment is made on a highly granular level for the use of the resources -- either time (so much per server-hour) or consumption (so much per gigabyte of storage per month). The consumer does not, however, own the assets that deliver those resources. Amazon owns the server and the storage machinery.

Survey after survey note that security is the biggest concern potential users have with respect to public cloud computing. Here, for example, is a survey from April 2010, indicating that 45 percent of respondents felt the risks of cloud computing outweigh its benefits. CA and the Ponemon Institute conducted a survey and found similar concerns. But they also found that deployment had occurred despite these worries. And similar surveys and results continue to be published, indicating the mistrust about security persists.

Most of the concerns voiced about cloud computing relate to the public variant, of course. IT practitioners throughout the world consistently raise the same issues about using a public cloud service provider (CSP). For example, this week I am in Taiwan and yesterday gave an address to the Taiwan Cloud SIG. Over 250 people attended, and, predictably enough, the first question addressed to me was, "Is public cloud computing secure enough, and shouldn't I use a private cloud to avoid any security concerns?" People everywhere, it seems, feel that public CSPs are not to be trusted.

One of the aspects of cloud computing I find most fascinating is the fact that much, if not most, of the discussion about it focuses on how it affects infrastructure. Boiled down, most people spend their time thinking about what hypervisor should underpin their cloud, what server form factor should host their cloud, what storage device should persist their virtual machines, and so on.

While there's no question cloud computing represents a big change in infrastructure, that approach overlooks the fact that cloud computing is comprised of an agile infrastructure married to automated operation. If you install the former without implementing the latter, your revolution is only half-completed. The second half of the revolution is about bringing automation to daily operations and ensuring that one's cloud offers on-demand resource access, application scalability and elasticity, and a generalized resource pool available as needed.

Last week I wrote about how CIOs should go about rolling out cloud computing initiatives. In the piece, my conclusion was headed "An Unusually Fast Platform Shift"; I noted that the pace of innovation and adoption regarding cloud computing far outstrips any previous platform shift.

This week, two announcements reinforced that perspective. Both of them are critical for CIOs going forward with cloud computing plans and, though not much commentary has linked them, I believe they are complementary and reflect how profoundly cloud computing will change the nature of corporate IT in the future.

The spread of enthusiasm for cloud computing seems unstoppable. Cloud computing -- a term that was unknown prior to 2007 -- has been named by Gartner as the number one priority for CIOs in 2011. One cannot recall a technology development that has gone from unheard-of to a key role in IT plans so quickly. So why has this unprecedented fervent cloud furor come to pass?

[Cloud Costs: CIOs Need to Plan Better]