In my last blog entry, I talked about the importance of understanding how data is managed within a cloud environment to ensure data protection and compliance with local legislation.

In the last couple weeks I’ve seen a number of contradictory blog entries on the future or lack of future of private clouds. Joe McKendrick enumerates 12 reasons why public clouds are better than private clouds, and Jonathan Gershater responds with 12 reasons why private clouds are better than public.

In my last blog entry I promised you I was going to come back to service orientation. So, let me keep my promise. Let me actually start with a story.

More than 10 years ago some colleagues and I worked with two financial institutions on projects to combine workflow management and object orientation. How did we get there? In discussions with the customer we came to the conclusion that a typical financial services process consists of multiple steps. The actual steps do not change typically, but which steps are used do.

From all my cloud related conversations, I’m gaining a strong impression two worlds are colliding. On the one hand, most of the CIOs I talk to are focused on providing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), whether it is internally to their business users, or externally as service providers. But when I look around me and talk to end-users, they seem interested in the delivery of “applications.” Many of them don’t even talk about cloud; they rather discuss app download and functionality. I’d say this is close to what SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) represents.

In my last couple blog posts I outlined the difference between an IT-oriented versus a user-oriented cloud. An IT oriented cloud is one where infrastructure is provisioned to facilitate the installation of the application as and when a new instance of that application is required. It consists in the automation of the provisioning of the appropriate number of virtual and/or physical machines with the right configurations and the connection of those through secured networking with appropriate storage capacity. The installation of the target application can also be automated.

Ich kann nicht sagen, wie oft mir schon die Frage gestellt wurde, wie sich die Implementierung oder den Einsatz von Cloud Computing rechtfertigen lässt - und häufig dreht sich die Diskussion um traditionelle ROI-Kalkulationen (ROI = Return on Investment). Und in vielen Fällen ist es schwer, das zu rechtfertigen. Warum? Aus zwei Gründen: Zum einen haben viele IT-Abteilungen keinen Überblick über die tatsächlichen Kosten der bestehenden Umgebung, zum anderen sind die Einsparungen oft nur schwer kalkulierbar und basieren zudem auf Annahmen, von denen viele fragwürdig sind.