Amazon Snafu Will Further Intensify Internal Cloud Provision

In October last year, Unisphere Research released “Privatizing the Cloud: 2010 IOUG Survey on Cloud Computing”. In light of this past weekend’s Amazon public cloud service interruption, its worth citing one of the study’s key findings:

“Adoption of private cloud solutions for IT workload processing or infrastructure is outpacing use of public platform service providers. About 14 percent use the services of public cloud platform providers, compared with 37 percent using private cloud for parts of their operations. Adoption of software as a service (SaaS) applications is more common, used by close to one out of four respondents. However, security issues continue to be a concern with use of public cloud and online application services, making private clouds a more attractive option to enterprises. IT departments also play a leading role in identifying and managing public cloud and SaaS.”

Add “availability” to the list of concerns with public cloud provision now. Enterprises typically look at three core values when evaluating a solution for mission-critical enterprise computing deployment: Availability, Scalabililty and Security. By this measure we now see external cloud provision raising concerns on availability, as well as the already-present concerns over security. That is two-out-of-three in the “questionable” column in the enterprise-readiness trifecta. And for the old dogs in the market, its starting to feel a little like the state of client-server computing in 1996. Amazon has some serious work ahead of it to get beyond these concerns – not impossible, but its going to need to be demonstrable and definitive.

This will be a defining, limiting moment for external cloud provision – reinforcing a strong trend toward internal cloud deployment.