With Cloud being the most abused technology buzzword today, any company would fire its CTO/CIO if the company doesn't have it's Cloud Strategy laid out. The most important value prop of the Cloud has been "Moving your CapEx to OpEx" . Though the TCO and ROI calculations would indicate a full transition to the Cloud as a No-brainer decision, too many technology gaps still remain before that transition can happen, and trust me it is going to be a painfully slow and gradual transition process.
This gradual process brings us to the title of the post, "Virtual Private datacenters". Cloud providers need to offer a seamless and highly secure mechanism for extending the enterprise datacenters to the cloud. Amazon recently introduced the "Virtual Private Cloud" (VPC) last month to setup a VPN tunnel from the corporate datacenter to the cloud. I prefer calling it the Virtual Private Datacenter to drive the fact that enterprises would also need their management/monitoring/security applications to work seamlessly across the datacenter and cloud infrastructure.
The cloud adoption acceleration largely depends on the datacenter management tool vendors. Some of the early innovators who have jumped on the Cloud Bandwagon include VMLogix who have added the capability to their flagship product LabManager, to manage and provision resources on the Amazon cloud too .
Security provider Breach Security Inc recently tied up with Akamai to offer a web application security solution spanning the datacenter and the cloud .
The other area of focus has been hybrid clouds. Zeus technologies had recently announced its capability for traffic management across hybrid clouds . Though I am not a real fan of hybrid clouds (we still haven't seen any large scale adoption of hybrid virtualization environments yet!!!), there seems to be some predictions around the opportunity for 'cloud brokers' too..
Hoping to see Virtual Private Datacenter technology really taking off in 2010 and watch this space for more posts around cloud technologies and strategies for enterprises to plan their migration to the cloud.
