Is Cloud Computing Really Right for Your Business?

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Scott Allan Miller.

Private clouds, hosted or on-premise, are rapidly becoming commonplace. More and more businesses are learning of cloud computing and seeing that running their own cloud is both feasible and potentially valuable. But due to a general lack of cloud knowledge, it is becoming more and more common that clouds are recommended when they do not suit the needs of the business at all. Often this happens when people confuse private clouds with traditional virtualization management systems.

The Differences Between Virtualization and Cloud Computing

A cloud is a special type of virtualization platform and fills a unique niche. Cloud computing takes traditional virtualization and layers it with automated scaling and provisioning that allows for rapid, horizontal scaling of applications. This is not a normal business need…

Cloud also lends itself, and is often tied to, self-service of resource provisioning. But this alone does not make an IT environment a cloud nor justify the move to a cloud platform—although it could be an added incentive. What makes the cloud interesting is the ability to provide self-service portals to end users and the ability for applications to self-provision themselves. These are the critical aspects that set a cloud platform apart from traditional virtualization…

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