CIO — I
don't know how I missed this, but at the Gartner IT Symposium in October,
Darryl Plummer (Chief of Gartner Cloud Research) apparently stated that
enterprises should deploy applications in a public cloud provider as a default,
and only deploy them in a private cloud if the public alternative is not
appropriate.
I became aware of
Plummer's recommendation, which caused quite a stir in the blog world when he
first announced it, via Twitter earlier this week.
Naturally, much of the furor over Plummmer's pronouncement
was a reaction to the quick summary: Gartner prefers public cloud. Wow. That's
a big deal, right? Gartner is probably telling all of its clients that they
should trim their private cloud plans and instead focus on public cloud service
providers. And, in response, all of its clients are scrapping their private
cloud initiatives and planning a big move to public providers, right?
Actually, that's quite unlikely, for some very sensible
reasons.
First, people misunderstand
the nature of analyst firms. They assume that these firms are corporate in
nature and monolithic in their positions. In fact, a better way to look at
analyst firms is that they are much like professional firms (e.g., law firms,
consulting partnerships, etc.). Such firms are comprised of relatively
independent individuals, each with his or her own opinion.
For example, one can
present the same issue to two attorneys within the same law firm and get two
different recommendations about what to do (I speak here from personal
experience). Likewise two analysts from the same firm will hold different
opinions about the right approach to a specific technology issue.
Consequently, even if
one or more (or most) analysts at a firm hold one opinion, there are probably
others who hold a different opinion. At the very least, when presented with a
specific issue, analysts will likely proffer different recommendations, based
on their interpretation of the issue. Of course, it's important to keep in mind
that every situation is specific and different. If blanket advice were
sufficient, there would be no need for analyst firms. Let me be clear, I'm
discussing this phenomenon in general—not picking on Gartner specifically. As I
said last
week, I am not one to gainsay Gartner.
Second, as a complement to the fact that opinion at analyst
firms differs, clients tend to take their recommendations selectively.
Companies tend to have their goals and they seek support and affirmation for
them, searching until they find third-party advice that can be cited as
impartial evidence for pursuing the direction that they have already decided
upon. This is crudely referred to as "shopping for an opinion."
Continue Reading at CIO.com
Enterprises should consider public cloud services first and turn to private clouds only if the public cloud fails to meet their needs.
That was the advice delivered by analyst Daryl Plummer during Gartner's IT Symposium Tuesday. Plummer says that there are many potential benefits to deploying cloud services, including agility, reduced cost, reduced complexity, increased focus, increased innovation, and being able to leverage the knowledge and skills of people outside the company.
The trick for IT professionals is to perform a thorough analysis that identifies which benefits the company hopes to achieve by moving to the cloud. Of course, there are also reasons to not take the cloud route. Those include the inability to get the service-level agreements that you want, regulatory and compliance issues, concerns about disaster recovery and the realization that the cloud might not end up saving you money.
Plummer said an accurate cost analysis is particularly tricky, since you're weighing capital expenses versus recurring costs. He added that customers often underestimate their cloud usage costs, and most companies moving to the cloud will require the services of a cloud broker, which adds to the total tab.
While the cloud hype has reached a fever pitch, Plummer points out that there are a number of potential risks. Those include security, transparency, assurance, lock-in and integration issues. If you do decide to start moving applications to the cloud, start at the edges and work your way into the core, says Plummer. The most common apps to start with are email, social, test and development, productivity apps, and Web servers.
One other point to keep in mind is that individual business units have probably already moved to software as a service (SaaS), so Plummer recommends that IT execs make a concerted effort to get ahead of these rogue SaaS users.
If you break cloud revenues down by the three main categories, SaaS revenues come in first at $12 billion worldwide in 2011, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) at $4.2 billion and platform as a service (PaaS) at $1.4 billion. But Gartner predicts that over the next five years IaaS will grow by 48 percent, while PaaS will only grow 13 percent and SaaS will grow 16.3 percent.
Source: Infoworld
As per a report published on Moneycontrol.com website:
The domestic cloud computing industry is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 53% to be a Rs 2,434 crore market by 2014, a study conducted by CyberMedia Research India said.
"The public cloud computing market in India is estimated to touch Rs 2,434 crore in 2014 after growing at a CAGR of 53% between 2010-2014," a company statement said.
"Cloud computing is witnessing widespread interest from the vendor-service provider-channel community on the one hand and business leaders and CIOs on the other," CyberMedia Research India Software and IT Services Research Lead Analyst Kamal Vohra said.
This is fuelled by the strong belief that cloud computing will allow a large number of SMB enterprises to adopt the same enterprise class software and technology solutions, it added.
As per the study, penetration in cloud computing is expected to grow by 6.8% in 2012 from 4% in 2010.
On the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry, the study said the market was expected to grow by 50% to touch Rs 465 crore by this year-end.
The Infrastructure-as-a-service Industry (IaaS) was also expected to pickup pace after 2012. The overall CAGR for the India IaaS market during 2010-2014 was expected to be at 49%, the statement added.
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