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By Vincent Capasso
Deployment and migrations of Cloud based solutions have been planned, budgeted, initiated, and ultimately stalled by many corporate CIOs because of the uncertainty ( ie security risk ) associated with some popular vendor cloud solutions.
When it comes to cloud computing, corporate IT doesn't quite get it just yet. Simon Crosby, CTO, datacenter and cloud division, for Citrix Systems, stated recently at the GigaOM Structure Conference, that the "enterprise cloud isn't about adding more servers, virtual machines, and very costly engineers." Instead, the cloud adoption process is one of a "creative model of destruction," because the corporate cloud should be adopting automation for efficiency.
The other big barrier to enterprise cloud adoption is finding ways to merge the public cloud with private clouds in a way that provides trust and availability. Just think about the recent cloud failure at Amazon, could your company survive a sustained outage and if so what are the costs associated with this outage.
Crosby during his address, noted that enterprise employees will find ways to use the public cloud and avoid IT policies through the use of services such as Dropbox, Box.net, Amazon Web Services, and others. It's essentially a losing battle to fight the tide. Crosby pointed to the "cloud in your pocket," alluding to smartphone apps that already leverage cloud services.
Examples of these include Digg, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to name a few. There are no IT operations for the cloud-based bits of these apps. In addition, according to some analysts mobile app usage is surging ahead of the mobile web. This trend is not likely to change any time soon.
Crosby emphasized the point, saying this type of cloud is "growing faster than in the data center, laying waste to the notion of the PC and changing the enterprise IT segment faster than anything in a data center."
The key challenge, according to Crosby, is how to securely deliver enterprise data and services to employees who have a tendency to go anywhere outside IT and violate corporate policy. Centralizing data and building protected clients is one answer, while specialized virtual machines that can wall off data is another. Crosby thinks there's an even better solution out there that can offer continuous protection in a virtualized state, but it's just a concept for now.
Perhaps someone will develop this capability soon, until then I will keep my data locked up in my own data warehouse on my own servers managed by my own admins. Better safe than sorry mom always used to say. After all is that not the very definition of stress? - being held responsible for something ( in this case data and access ) that lies outside of your control.
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