Here a cloud, there a cloud, everybody's got a cloud-cloud.  Clouds are all the rage now a days and I wanted to talk a little bit more on public vs. private clouds.  With all these clouds popping up, it's easy to get confused and lose your mind trying to make sense of it all.  It's hard to IT professionals, let alone non-technical business owners.  I want to try to avoid a "cloud bubble" much like the Tulip "bubble" years ago.

What do I mean by public/private cloud?

Public Cloud - A service provider installs their software product in their data center then sells it (or gives it away) to their customers.  This would include companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, ADP, etc.  You generally access their services over the internet.  Usually, they are separate clouds and a firm must piece together multiple clouds to built their IT organization.  I would imagine I cannot install Google docs into my Microsoft Cloud?

Private Cloud - A firm builds a customized IT organization within their (ONE) datacenter to house ALL their IT needs.  This allows them to centralize their IT and reap the cost savings and economies of scale.

Now a private cloud could be designed/built/owned and operated by the firm themselves or they can contract out that service to an IT service provider to design/build/own/manage their IT.  A better term would be centralized and consolidated IT but "Cloud" is a better marketing term now so we use it.

Firms are looking for primarily two things:  1) More IT capability 2) less cost.  While a public cloud does provide some of these benefits, it also has the same effect as distributing your IT organization.  If a firm has 10 offices and they'd like to centralize into one datacenter, why would they go from 10 offices to 10 clouds?  Instead of having 10 physical offices of IT, they would have 10 virtual "cloud" offices of IT.  They might save a little bit, but they haven't really consolidated their IT--they've just clouded it.  As a CIO, I really don't want all my stuff scattered all over the place.  It's hard to manage and I'll still have to build (and maintain) interfaces between my public cloud providers.  And even if I do that, I'm working at Internet speeds rather than multi-gigabit data center speeds.  Many of us consolidate vendors to get better pricing. We should treat our cloud vendors no differently.

Right now, my preference is a private cloud.  But since not everyone agrees with me, I will start forming my Cloud Consolidation Consulting Practice (CCCP or is that acronym already taken?) as I see huge opportunities on the horizon.

Thanks for reading.

Chris France
CHUBBYCIO