SMARTER STRATEGIES

CIO Strategy: The Private and Public Clouds Mashup

Eric Lundquist | Date: 12-27-10 | Comments

The debate between public and private cloud computing environments has left some CIOs unsure of what to do. A mashup of the two cloud options might just be the answer.

Have we heard enough about cloud computing yet? Not by a long shot.

You have some vendors championing the idea of big public clouds, such as those from Google, that allow a business to carve out a piece of IT infrastructure while playing on the big computing stage. Other vendors are advocating private clouds, which promise all the advantages of that big public cloud but with the assurances of privacy, security and compliance. What's a CIO to do?

In fact, CIOs have heard all this before. And in my discussions with this community, which lives on the border between technology and business, I find that they are thinking three steps ahead of the vendors. That advanced thinking is something vendors should pay attention to. CIOs remember the rise of the Internet and the Web in the computing world. They remember those vendors urging them to run right to the wide-open Web and do commerce, communications and collaboration there. They remember those vendors championing private Internets as well, where you could realize all the advantages of open computing and common standards while maintaining control over the IT infrastructure.

They also remember what happened.

What happened was that companies ended up with mixed environments. Common applications such as e-mail and instant messaging moved to the Internet�either as revised applications from existing vendors or as new subscription offerings.

Meanwhile, proprietary applications, which often form the competitive advantage for companies, remained behind the corporate walls. The most technology-intensive task for CIOs was to make sure they had the people, the resources and the right strategy to mesh the worlds of the private and public Internet and Web-based applications. They had to decide when and where they wanted to poke holes in their computing structure to allow the public to come in and go out without endangering their enterprise.

The history lesson about public and private Internet development also foretells the future of public and private clouds. CIOs�based on my conversations�are generally advocates of cloud computing. They recognize the efficiencies of being able to divorce hardware from software resources. The drivers of flexibility, scale and higher infrastructure utilization are all within the capabilities of building a cloud computing-based infrastructure.

However, CIOs also know that they cannot mandate which cloud services will be allowed to operate in their companies. Executives will continue to bring in cloud-based services such as Gmail, Salesforce.com and myriad applications from emerging application-based marketplaces that allow application selection and deployment at the click of a mouse�similar to the Apple iPhone store. Wireless WiFi installations, smartphone usage and applications such as Google documents are all self-deploying applications that CIOs know they cannot prevent from mixing within the corporate infrastructure.

What CIOs can do is plan for the mashup of public and private clouds and develop a strategy that embraces the cloud mashup, rather than picking a side. Vendors would do well to stop trying to make CIOs pick a camp. Instead, they should endorse the mashed-up world of cloud computing.

It is, after all, the future.