I was at Interop in Las Vegas this week moderating a panel on the "false cloud debate." In short, the debate asks if private clouds are really clouds, or if "private cloud" is a marketing label for data centers and confusing the value of cloud computing. The panel consisted of James Waters from EMC VMware, James Urquhart from Cisco Systems, Peter Coffee from Salesforce.com, and John Keagy from GoGrid.
What struck me most about the "debate" was that it was not much of one at all. Although the panel started off bickering around the use, or overuse, of private clouds, the panelists quickly agreed that the private clouds have a place in the enterprise (to very different degrees), and that the end game is mixing and matching private and public cloud resources to meet the requirements of the business.
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Public cloud advocates have said for years that the core value of public clouds is the ability to scale and provision on demand and on the cheap -- they're right. However, many fail to accept there may be times when the architectural patterns of public clouds best serve the requirements of the business when implemented locally -- in a private cloud.
If you accept that the value of cloud computing is in some circumstances best expressed in a private cloud, it should become apparent that the movement to the cloud should be prefaced by good architecture, requirements gathering, and planning. Those who view the adoption of cloud computing as simply a matter of private versus public are destined to not understand the core business issues, and they risk making costly mistakes.
Architecture has to lead the day, and sane minds need to focus on the ability of clouds to serve the business: private, public, hybrid, or none. There is no debate about that.
This article, "The 'is the private cloud a false cloud?' debate is false," originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog and track the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.