Stories by: James Staten

A strong minority of enterprise IT shops are prioritizing the development of a private cloud, but Forrester surveys suggest these moves will fail. The reason lies in the motivation behind these efforts and the focus. Most are building private clouds to keep their developers from going to the public cloud and are focused on the physical aspects of the cloud, not the operations - and it's the operations that make the cloud.

The testing and development of new applications in the cloud becomes an ideal way to provide a business justification and to ensure the right fit between the applications, the IaaS solutions, and the right IT ops protections and processes.

IT professionals have the basic ingredients to cook up their own cloud-like infrastructure-but there's no recipe, and many ingredients don't combine well. Especially as infrastructure innovation evolves in a way that doesn't necessarily deliver better efficiency and instead, drives up complexity. Yet, the most common answer infrastructure and operations professionals recently told Forrester that what motivates server virtualization adoption was the need for greater efficiency and sharing of the IT infrastructure. Over the years, vendors have tried to accommodate this need, but have often provided solutions that left too much of the burden on their customers-until now. Recent integrated solutions take a big step toward delivering complete virtual infrastructures that just might solve some of the major issues IT professional face.

If you think the phrase "It's in the cloud" means that your data resides on the Internet and is thus accessible everywhere equally, think again. Most infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services share the same residence model as traditional hosting and outsourcing deployments -- they live in specific data centers in specific geographies. This means that customer data is generated and most likely stored in this physical location, giving it legal and privacy implications.

It seems as if every CIO comes back from a conference cocktail party demanding IT move to the cloud. While this can mean many things, including using software-as-a-service (SaaS), managed hosting, or application service providers (ASP), the demand often centers on moving applications out of your own budget-sucking data center and up to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform.