The public v private debate
A debate for a growing number of businesses is whether to run their IT infrastructure from a public or private cloud.
There is an important distinction and the decision may well be determined by the organisation’s attitude to IT, and how much ownership of the process it wants to retain.
The principles behind the public cloud are rudimentary IT services, hosted on a one-size-fits all platform, delivered to the customer over the internet. Such services are charged on a monthly usage fee and can be upscaled as required, adding capacity and paying more as you go along.
Amazon has pioneered this approach with a collection of cloud services that enable organisations to build virtual computing instances inside set templates. Its ‘elasticity’ means customers can increase or decrease capacity in minutes. “The public cloud is more for SMEs,” said Bryan Hickson, infrastructure services leader at IBM.
“They are able to access standardised IT solutions that they might previously have felt were out of their reach.”
While they no longer have to have servers on site and can put their IT in the cloud, the caveat is that the offerings are quite restrictive, according to Hickson. “They will give you a certain amount of space on a server running a particular operating system. They are standardised offerings and, as a customer, you have to fit in with it. There are only seven or eight flavours of application with limited levels of utilisation. If you want more, you have to buy another slot and split your data.”
Another issue is where the data is located. Public service providers may move data between different jurisdictions without specifying precise locations to the customer.
The upshot, according to Hickson, was that the public cloud was not going to be good enough for medium and large businesses in Europe, because they needed to know that their data resides in the EU to meet regulatory and security requirements. “The public cloud can’t ring fence and guarantee that, so it’s a big issue,” said Hickson.
Coming soon from IBM is a public cloud for SMEs intended to address this problem using five newly-built data centres. There will be one in Germany to meet European regulatory requirements.
Private functions
Simon Crosby, chief technology officer of the Citrix virtualisation division, was similarly critical of public clouds, and Amazon in particular. “Give them a credit card and within two minutes you can fire up a virtual machine. Enterprises don’t do that,” he said.
Amazon has launched the Virtual Private Cloud to bring greater assurances to enterprise customers, but Crosby said that organisations which needed to step up to the private cloud should look no further than telecoms providers.
“They already have agreements with customers to run some component of their infrastructure, and have dedicated resources under lock and key. They have been through all the hoops about what customers expect from a compliance perspective, and are building very attractive cloud services.”
Chris Roche, country manager of EMC Ireland, said that the discussion about public and private came down to controlling data in the cloud. “Security and control are how EMC differentiates with private clouds. The way we virtualise and encapsulate the infrastructure becomes very secure and efficient.”
As an organisation’s data multiplies the temptation is to throw more infrastructure at the problem. “But it doesn’t help your cost position,” said Roche. “EMC tries to get to the root cause, removing the data you have and, therefore, reducing infrastructure through de-duplication and archiving.”
The kind of cloud services that an organisation adopts says a lot about its IT maturity level. “In the basic model, IT is a cost function, then you move up and add value. The cloud facilitates stepping through IT maturity models quicker,” said Roche. “Eventually you could have a federated model, using private and public clouds.”
As you moved up the value chain into hybrid environments, more automation and built-in intelligence would deal with more complex requirements, said Hickson. “Non-critical apps that don’t have the same security requirement could be moved to the public cloud, improving the performance of the critical application in the private cloud.”
