Cloud deployment – Public, Private, or Hybrid. Which will win in 2012?
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 6:29:21 PM
At the end of the summer, Gartner released its annual hype cycle projections for emerging and trending technology. Different models of cloud computing, such as the public, private and hybrid products, were listed at various places on the cycle, with the public cloud trending downward going into 2012, and the hybrid cloud gaining steam.
Business Day recently published an article questioning the legitimacy of the cloud industry versus the commonly held perception of it. According to the source, the biggest proponents of the cloud industry have been the vendors, especially in the sense of selling the technology.
However, this is not entirely true. While cloud industry executives are certainly front and center in propelling business, other IT personnel and officials have made some of the bigger, more broadly-reaching statements condoning the advent of the technology in their respective enterprises and agencies.
For example, the National Security Agency's Cyber Command Commander General Keith Alexander issued a statement last month that seemed to be a public acceptance of cloud computing into federal defense and law enforcement strategies. General Alexander explained that the cloud could spell some of the most successful advances in federal intelligence strategies and operations in decades.
Additionally, former and first federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra has been consistently published and reported on for his Cloud First Initiative. The policy, which took effect during Kundra's short term as federal CIO in 2009, aims to allocate more than a quarter of the government's total of $80 billion in IT spending toward cloud computing deployment.
Business Day also related the evolution of the cloud industry to the advent of voice-over internet protocol systems, saying that though it might be in hot demand now, it won't likely continue on its path of dominance in the IT realm.
This goes against many projections from some of the biggest leaders in IT today, including Gartner and the International Data Corporation, both of which have high expectations for the cloud throughout the next few years, and reaching to the remainder of the current decade.
"Both [the] public and private cloud will grow in the server market through 2015," senior research analyst at IDC's Enterprise Servers and Datacenter Trends Katherine Broderick said in a report from the firm. "Cloud will grow from a $5.2 billion opportunity in 2011, representing almost 885,000 units, to a $9.4 billion market in 2015, with over 1.8 million units.
-McAfee Cloud Security
