Business Imperative for Virtual Private Cloud Services
Apparently attorneys, corporate security consultants and numerous other industry pundits have discovered the cloud services phenomenon. Some are actively promoting fear, uncertainty and doubt about the “potential” for growing security, transparency and data portability concerns.
However, there’s a compelling precedent that alleviates most irrational anxiety. It’s helpful to recall that more than four decades of corporate computing started with the adoption of time-sharing services in the 1960s. All is still well, and the sky has yet to fall.
The recent calls for renewed caution are clearly being heeded with due diligence, and then promptly disarmed by the proven track record of addressing these issues, as needed.
Growing Trend of Cloud Adoption
In fact, an IDC survey of IT executives, CIOs, and their line of business (LOB) colleagues further demonstrates that cloud services are being mainstreamed and will be entering a period of widespread adoption.
IDC expects the cloud adoption trend to be amplified by the current business environment. They believe that a cloud model offers a much more cost-effective way for businesses to acquire and use IT - in an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage will be greatly magnified.
According to IDC survey respondents, the two most important things a cloud services provider can offer are:
- competitive pricing and
- performance level assurances
These are followed by the ability to demonstrate an understanding of the customer’s industry and the ability to move cloud services back on-premises - if and when necessary.
Managed Cloud Services Evolution
Virtual private cloud services are an essential foundation for future developments within the evolving managed data center service delivery value chain.
The use case is rock solid, and it’s likely to become an integral part of future hybrid scenarios - where local and remote virtual elements come together as a comprehensive computing solution.
The long term vision is to create the Inter-Cloud, which is open and allows federation, portability and market creation. The evolution to the Inter-cloud requires service providers to build the public cloud, and then unite it with other trusted clouds on-demand.
Cisco’s Unified Service Delivery is a major transition that brings providers one step closer to fulfilling the vision by combining the power and capabilities of two major strategic initiatives: Data Center 3.0 and the Cisco IP NGN (IP Next Generation Network).
Cisco USD delivers Data Center 3.0 for the SP and integrates it with the IP NGN, optimizing them for virtualization by incorporating various Cisco partners. We’re eager to enable more SPs to join us as we continue our journey of discovery on the road to cloud-based services business model development. How can we help you plan for this increasing market demand?
Posted by Simon Aspinall at 10:44AM PST
Douglas Gourlay Jul 17, 2009
Simon,
I agree completely with your perspective here, that shared services were the genesis of computing systems because of cost issues and the batch nature of the jobs at that time. Terminals extended the time someone could ‘compute’ and life got easier, then systems became increasingly real-time.
The security of cloud computing services has room to improve and be better understood, especially ina s hared-control model between enterprise and service provider, although in straight SP-control models today there are already HIPAA compliant offerings and PCI compliant offerings available, some of the tougher commercial security guidelines.
Room to improve, yes.
Security Nightmare? Hardly! That would be an uninformed opinion.