When is a cloud not (quite) a cloud?

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

At a recent Dell roundtable event on the future of cloud computing, the discussion centred around how cloud was not being adopted wholesale by many organisations yet. Various reasons were put forward, such as fear of change, fear of losing control, security issues and so on. A little while later on, several people were pushing the case for cloud around its capability to enable innovation.

Sure, cloud computing can provide a different way of doing things and can encourage a completely different way of facilitating business process – but if this is pushed as the main way that cloud works, then surely all that is happening is that users will be put off more? If fear of change is a factor to scare organisations off from using cloud, then moving critical business workloads to a relatively unproven emerging platform AND changing the way the application runs has to be enough not only to put the techies off the change, but also the business?…

The view put forward by Quocirca was that organisations could start with a low-risk approach. If base level workloads such as file and print, email, payroll and so on were taken and moved onto a cloud architecture where resources could be shared in a flexible and dynamic manner, organisations could see that cloud worked and was ready for the higher level and more complex workloads. At this stage, mayhem ensued. Several cries went up that this was just virtualisation, and not cloud. Why? Because it did not have self-service…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/the-big-picture-blog/2225346/when-is-a-cloud-not-quite-a-cloud