Virtualization and Cloud Advisor Blog

Remember those 'Tastes great! Less filling!' beer ads? Many debate cloud computing in a similar manner, saying the cloud's great because it's either agile or inexpensive. As it turns out, cloud computing's affordability and agility aren't mutually exclusive--and that's good news for enterprise IT.

Application-tuning capabilities coupled with today's commodity cloud offerings are more than many users need. Just like broadband Internet, though, it's only a matter of time before these 'overserved' users turn to the commodity cloud to meet 'unserved' needs. Will this leave enterprise cloud deployments in the cold?

The rapid rise of cloud computing means corporate IT may no longer be the cheapest purveyor of application hosting, infrastructure, storage and other services. The sooner IT leaders come to terms with this, the better.

Traditional IT vendors may deride Amazon as a mere bookseller, but Amazon Web Service is growing quickly, not to mention inexpensively. If those vendors aren't careful, AWS will soon compete against them in the enterprise cloud computing market--and if current trends hold, the competition may not even be close.

With major vendors such as Dell, HP, IBM and RackSpace throwing their weight behind OpenStack, the project is poised to be a preeminent private cloud player. But discussions at the recent OpenStack Summit show that the project does have some growing up to do before it gets there.

At this year's Cloud Connect conference, discussion moved from defining cloud computing to discussing practical enterprises applications of the cloud. That is, until two McKinsey consultants suggested that the cloud could spell the end of IT organizations as we know them.

Traditional BI requires human input to decide what correlated factors to query. As predictive data analytics gets increasingly powerful, the algorithms do the deciding. That spells the end of BI as CIO.com columnist Bernard Golden knows it--and he doesn't feel fine about it.

At a recent partner conference, VMware executives threw a fit about the firm's inability to 'own corporate workload' and its partners' inability to beat a 'bookseller' at the cloud computing game. The outbursts show is that VMware isn't connecting with application groups, who are increasingly driving cloud buying decisions.

These days, there's no such thing as a stable system, especially in the cloud. But most outages can be blamed on application architecture, not infrastructure. To combat this, do what Netflix does: Put your apps through a ringer that breaks them and fix your software before your customers suddenly can't use it.

Defenders of enterprise computing are in for a rude awakening. Mobile, media and marketing applications are poised to flock to the cloud, which is far better suited to handle load variability, latency and change management. As end users and executives demand more flexibly business applications, they will soon follow suit.