Greg Ness

The public cloud has been promoted as a low cost alternative to physical data center infrastructure, mostly to small and medium-sized businesses. That has driven the creation of a robust category of cloud migration services which has emerged as these smaller businesses have made considerable investments in moving their apps from colocation and data center environments into public clouds. Enterprises, however, have been notably slower to invest in public cloud and cloud migration, at least in proportion to their overall IT budgets.  There are many reasons for the slower enterprise adoption of public loud (IaaS) and they have been discussed extensively. I think what is missing is a more robust discussion of the next killer apps for the cloud; the enterprise game changers. ­­ I think the new cloud killer apps for enterprises will leverage cloud-integrated data cente... (more)

Hybrid Cloud Is the Future

Amazon and Google have done a remarkable job promoting public cloud, as VMware, Cisco and OpenStack have done similarly with private cloud.  Yet late last year at the December Gartner Data Center Conference 2012 the dominant theme was neither public cloud nor private cloud, but rather hybrid cloud.  The hybrid cloud is form of cloud computing whereby applications and services can run across multiple clouds, colocation and data centers seamlessly, as a single hybrid cloud. Before you dismiss hybrid cloud as another marketing twist on cloudwashing, consider its roots and evolution... (more)

Cloud Migration Is Not Enough

  Just as enterprises are dabbling in cloud migration by migrating virtualized instances into public clouds, along comes the hybrid cloud meme, offering enterprises the promise of building their own hybrid clouds out of both virtual and unmodified apps running in cloud- integrated data centers. Datamation predicted that the hybrid cloud management market would reach $3.6B by 2016.  That’s right; in three years that would make hybrid cloud a larger market in 2016 than Amazon's estimated $2B in 2012. Last fall Gartner struck a very aggressive hybrid cloud tone at their December D... (more)

Hybrid Cloud and Its Future Role in Market Leadership

There are a handful of publicly-traded companies vying for leadership in cloud computing, among them Amazon, VMware, Microsoft, and Rackspace. There is even a cloud ETF (SKYY). That is why the current debate regarding the future of public, private and hybrid cloud operating models is significant to the futures of these companies, as well as many others in hardware, software and even data center co-location. If the public cloud becomes the cloud of choice for enterprise IT pros, Amazon will have a commanding position in the evolution of the multi-trillion enterprise IT market. Li... (more)

Hybrid Cloud Is Not Public Cloud

There is a temptation to think that all cloud operating models are identical and are commonly driven by interest in commodity IT, or IT delivered at the lowest possible cost.  For many (especially early) cloud customers may certainly be the case.  I predict, however, that hybrid cloud will be driven by very different operating expectations, driven by new solutions that set new IT productivity standards.  It will be driven more by value-added IT, or IT services delivered at the highest level of productivity and speed.  The current popular forms of cloud can be difficult to enter an... (more)