Global market research and analyst giant Gartner has recently produced a brief but informative paper for newcomers to cloud computing called, unsurprisingly, What You Need To Know About Cloud Computing. Although primarily aimed at the enterprise level, this report gives some in-depth information that will also be of use to smaller companies with some technological know-how and even the self employed who wish to get to grips with the nitty gritty of virtualisation and cloud technology.
The paper starts be debunking three of the myths about cloud computing:
Myth: Only mega providers will win
Fact: There are diminishing returns to economies of scale, there are many fragmented markets that have good enough scale for smaller providers, and innovation makes provider agility a critical offsetter to size.
Myth: There will be a "big switch."
Fact: There will be a slow migration (including development of private cloud services), the migration will take decades, and even then quite a bit of IT will stay in-house; in fact, most of the interesting stuff will be hybrid models.
Myth: Cloud computing is IT commoditization.
Fact: While services offered in the cloud may be commoditizing, the usage of those services may not — new innovative businesses, proprietary analysis of data in the cloud, etc. — new applications matter.
The report looks in some depth at two key areas – (a) what is cloud computing and how will it evolve? and (b) what is private cloud computing and when should enterprises leverage it?
As well as giving the necessary definitions of cloud computing and its components, the paper provides a number of strategic and tactical guidelines such as:
- The future of cloud services will be dynamic and fluid, with horizontal and vertical federation. Although highly integrated and proprietary vertical cloud services will exist, they will be a minority
- Virtualization enables alternative delivery models that will create new
modes of computing management and delivery during the next few years — and will fundamentally change how IT is managed and accessed. - Through 2012, more than 75% of enterprise use of cloud computing will be devoted to very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by startups with little to no IT infrastructure
- The cloud computing market will expand from proprietary megaproviders (today), to ecosystems and supply chains of providers, to thousands of smaller providers that rely on agility and standards for interoperability to compete.
The report finishes with some solid recommendations as show in then chart below.
The report can be downloaded here.
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