Is Private PaaS the On-Ramp to Public Cloud?

Grazed from Wired. Author: Sinclair Schuller.

Public cloud is tremendously popular — there’s no question. However, enterprises have yet to consume public IaaS and PaaS in an “at-scale” way. They dabble in public IaaS and PaaS here and there, but public cloud is home to only a *tiny* minority of enterprise application workloads. Why? Enterprise workloads are trapped within the firewall by a few key constraints (some perceived, some political, some real – in order of constraint complexity):

• Dependencies – Custom apps written by enterprises often have dependencies on other external systems that either: A) can’t themselves be brought to public cloud, thereby making them inaccessible; or B) cannot be safely exposed to the outside world such that those dependencies can be resolved
• Performance – Stringent performance requirements may prevent certain applications from landing on a public cloud, particularly when high I/O performance is required.
  Security – Public clouds may not be able to fulfill security requirements, particularly in regulated industries such as banking.
• Data – Because of size and sensitivity, many data loads may not be easy to move to a public cloud. This data acts as an anchor; a corollary is that most applications depending on this data will also not move to public cloud…

Long term, however, most of these barriers will break down (starting with dependencies first), and it’s pretty clear that as a result, enterprises will consume a meaningful amount of public AND private cloud. Ultimately, the end state for enterprise IT will be hybrid, and yes, enterprises WILL consume a meaningful amount of public cloud. However, the secret to getting there is implementing private PaaS first. Why, you ask? Because of the above constraints…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/07/is-private-paas-the-on-ramp-to-public-cloud/