Many businesses are not ready for the full cloud; instead a hybrid model is emerging that combines the benefits of the public cloud with the control of the private cloud.
This is the view of Mark Lewis, senior director of marketing and alliances at Riverbed, an IT infrastructure performance company. Lewis maintains that nobody is delivering the full cloud: “We are seeing examples of infrastructure as a service; platform as a service; and software as a service, but nobody is delivering all of these,” he explains.
Commenting on the barriers to the full uptake of the cloud, Lewis states that security and performance remain key concerns for businesses. “Customers still want to know if they will be able to manage and secure all of their assets and IP in the cloud.”
However, businesses have also realised the benefits of cloud computing, such as speed of deployment and reduced infrastructure costs, he notes. “The speed at which business are able to deploy services to employees is much faster and the overall cost of managing infrastructure is reduced.”
Lewis predicts that although many businesses are not ready to adopt the full cloud, as they grow they will increasingly need services that the cloud has to offer.
The next phase
“Everything has the potential to be outsourced to the cloud,” maintains Lewis. He explains that storage to the cloud is becoming an attractive option for cost and operational reasons. “Storage needs are exploding and CIOs would like to make growth storage someone else's problem.”
However, concerns about performance, the need to rewrite applications and fears about vendor lock-in could stall the movement of storage to the cloud, warns Lewis.
Lewis says Riverbed's storage for the cloud solution has enabled the WAN (wide area network) to act like the SAN (storage area network). This technology addresses protocol inefficiencies for block storage protocols that result in order of magnitude gains over the WAN at the event.
The technology means that storage will no longer have to be tethered locally, he says. Instead, companies can now locate and move storage assets to sites anywhere in the world.
“This capability allows companies to bridge the public cloud and the private cloud, allowing the best of both.”
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