I can't stand IT people talking or writing about private clouds. I don't get them, what they are, why anyone would care. I have a suspicion that they are simply trying to confuse all the business people out there. Lots of jargon, lots of technical terms, advanced sounding language, and hope that maybe some business people might think there is something to it.
"They" bring up scary sounding (but really baseless) objections to public clouds that might scare some business people about putting their data in the cloud.
They say -
1) Its insecure. This is total bullshit. The real truth is that a real cloud provider is far more secure than a privately managed infrastructure can ever be.
2) Its not government compliant. Huh? What the hell is that objection..!! Where'd they get that.? Please, read SOX. Its about policy, procedure, and controls.. No one makes a judgment as to how to achieve it. In fact, it is far easier to put those controls in place with a real cloud provider like salesforce.com.
I'm more in the "make fun of the private cloud people" tribe. Peter Coffee sums it up pretty nicely.
I used to feel the same exact way 10 years ago during the ASP hype days. (Application Service Provider for the young readers.) Though there were some real service clouds even back then like openair.com or even quickbase.com, there was a lot more companies taking on premises equipment and hosting it for you in their data centers, and calling them selves ASPs. I used to think, gee, what the hell are you doing for me again besides moving my machines and reselling me your pipe?
Fast forward 2010. Same bullshit, this private cloud stuff. The Cloud Movement is real, its growing fast, it has real benefits, and real adoption. So there is a lot of companies mostly in the in infrastructure space renaming their hosted / "managed" services to private clouds.
Smart people, smart companies will see through the propaganda. The real, open, cloud service providers will be the only winners in this race.
