I always keep an eye out for reports from the front lines, so I was particularly interested in a provocatively titled article by Brandon Butler that appeared in Network World, “What’s holding back the cloud industry?”
Brandon was covering the recent Cloud Connect show in Chicago, and he took advantage of the opportunity to speak with some of the cloud industry’s thought leaders. His question for each of them: While there is palpable enthusiasm for the cloud, why are many enterprise IT shops still reticent to fully embrace public cloud computing? Some of the answers were revealing.
Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst at 451 Research Group, says one of the biggest barriers to cloud adoption is organizational. Typically, IT organizations are divided into groups focused on compute, network and storage. When applications are run in the cloud, all of those functions are managed from one provider. That means the jobs from each of those groups within IT may have to change. Says Hanselman: “You’ve got to converge.” Easier said than done.
Krishnan Subramanian, director of OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat, pointed to a familiar bugbear: security. Cloud providers may spend big bucks to keep their services secure, but Subramanian says it’s almost instinctual for IT execs to be concerned about cloud security. He says that vendors could be more forthcoming about their security efforts, but naturally they don’t want to divulge secrets. Still, they need to provide enough details to assuage enterprise concerns.
For his part, Randy Bias, CTO of OpenStack company Cloudscaling, says that a new computing model calls for new apps. Firms using the cloud to deliver legacy apps are missing the boat. “Cloud is about new apps that deliver new business value,” he states, adding that organizations need to be forward-thinking and willing to embrace new applications powered by big data and distributed systems.
Read, "Red Hat CIO: Five lessons for taking your enterprise to the cloud."