Educating those users is precisely the other hurdle Microsoft will have to start negotiating in 2010, according to Andi Mann, vice president at Enterprise Management Associates.
"I think for Microsoft in 2010 the cloud is going to be more important from a marketing and positioning perspective than an actual use case," says Mann, who at the end of the month will publish a report entitled "The Responsible Cloud" that looks at drivers, adoption patterns, management, security and other areas.
Mann says the report shows that across all enterprises, adoption of cloud computing is 11%. "That is really quite small," he says.
His data also shows that only 16% of those who have adopted cloud computing, or will within 12 months, will go solely with an off-premises model. But 50% of those respondents will go with a mixture on both on-premises and off premises.
Mann says the cloud computing model that is least popular with users is platform-as-a-cloud that Azure represents. The most popular is software-as-a-service, represented for Microsoft by BPOS, and infrastructure as a service, represented by SQL Azure and integration technology.
It is that last area that will represent much of Microsoft's building in 2010.
Project Sydney, which was introduced as a concept at PDC, creates a sort of virtual network that ties together pieces of an application or processes running in various places so they all look like one logical system. AppFabric is an application server layer, which includes hosting and caching technologies, that spans the cloud and internal servers so developers have a single, consistent environment for .Net applications. Visual Studio 2010 will include templates that allow movement of cloud applications between hosted and internal networks. System Center "Cloud" management tools that go into beta in 2010 will provide a unified console for managing on-premises and cloud assets in the same way.
"Lots of applications will be split between cloud and IT or multiple places and we want to have bridging technologies and we are going to provide these services or tools or various ways to help you partition your app in any way you want," Microsoft's Srivastava says. He cited Sydney as an example along with AppFabric and its access control and service bus features.The building, however, won't all be original work. On Dec. 11, Microsoft bought Opalis, which develops IT automation technology, and will use it to extend its System Center tools across corporate networks and the cloud.
The list represents only a handful of what is likely needed to connect internal IT systems with the cloud and do it in a secure and managed way to support mission-critical applications.
"The full dimensions of the problems will develop over time as organizations step into the cloud," says Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner.
EMA's Mann says couple all that with the fact that "IT never gets rid of anything" and you have a situation where "IT is not going to move to the cloud, they are going to add the cloud to what they have."
And how IT can go about doing that will be Microsoft's challenge. The clock begins ticking louder in 2010.
Follow John on Twitter: twitter.com/johnfontana
Ad Choices
Comments