I attended an Enterprise Cloud Computing Conference a couple of weeks back. The conference gave some interesting insights into the Cloud space.

Contemplate before moving to cloud. Not everything is meant to be in the cloud. Identify the cloud characteristics and check whether your application/offering needs it. Some of the key things include:

•  On demand pooled resource (hardware, network, software etc) 
•  Elasticity, fault tolerance 
•  Measured service for monitoring, billing etc
•  What will be the cost of moving to the cloud? Will it be less? Hopefully, yes is the answer.

Identifying the kind of service that you are going to offer is important:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IasS) – hardware, network, storage etc
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) – middleware
• Software as a Service (SaaS) – eg, CRM, ERP offerings on cloud

Another aspect is to choose the correct cloud model: Public (open to the whole world), Private (within an organization) or hybrid (some part Public and some part private).

There are three key players in the cloud:

• Cloud Providers
• Cloud Consumers
• Cloud Developers

In addition, in my opinion, there are "providers" to Cloud Providers where companies like IBM play a key role. For e.g., providing the required infrastructure and software to allow businesses to be a cloud provider. This is in addition to IBM being a cloud provider itself.

If you decide to move to the cloud, just putting the offering on the cloud as is will not be enough. It needs to be, if required, re- architected for the cloud especially for elasticity and fault tolerance.

An interesting argument presented was that the Public cloud might be more secure than private cloud since it is hardened through continual hacking attempts and public cloud providers usually engage the best security resources (including latest hardware and people).

The conference provided an overview of the Cloud Strategy from various vendors and I must say that the offering from IBM looked pretty comprehensive. It was mentioned that IBM’s reference architecture for cloud looked to address the big telecommunication players since it has BSS and OSS as part of it. I had my doubts and this reference provides a good view from IBM’s perspective and does clarify that it is indeed not the case: http://www.opengroup.org/cloudcomputing/uploads/40/23840/CCRA.IBMSubmission.02282011.doc (page 22).

Identificações:  cloud_strategy ibm_cloud