Poll: What Do You Think of IT Clouds?

October 1, 2009 – 7:28 pm

Clouds

IT clouds (compute, applications, storage, and services) are a popular topic for discussion with some people being entirely sold on them as the way of the future, while others totally dismissing them, meanwhile, there’s plenty of thoughts in between.

I recently shared some of my thoughts in this blog post about IT clouds, now whats your take (your identity will remain confidential)?

Cheers – gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIO, Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC) Technorati tags:
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Amalia Alvarez

I am extremely interested to lear more about cloud and virtualization please can you help me how to get more information and to learn all about it.
Amalia
Wayne

We have created an Application Development Platform using IBM's latest Jazz technology that is fully installed and ready to run in VMWare images. Right now our clients are hosting the images on their desktop and in their data center. These same images are also ready to be hosted in a cloud should the demand for such a service begin to pick up. The environment is called Presto.
Scott Price

The cloud is a tremendous enabler for us. The elasticity allows us to provide a SaaS load testing tool with massive scalability for under $0.01/user/hour of testing.

I was on an IT panel about cloud computing a few months ago. The leadership of Fortune 1000 companies (CIO, CTO, etc.) do not trust putting their applications on the cloud because they have no control over SLA. 99.5% uptime is not good enough for them - understandably. Although they throw out that statistic, we have found Amazon EC2 to deliver 99.99% for us.

Clouds aren't perfect, but they are a game-changer in some industries such as ours. It is foolish for the CTO to buy a server farm just to generate load for performance testing that is only needed a few weeks out of the year. The cloud can provide a much more cost-effective solution for them. Not only load testing, but I'm sure there are many other web applications that are a good fit for external, non-mission-critical hosting.
Paul

We're seeing an increased interest in clouds from SMEs over here in the UK. For many, the biggest barrier to moving to a cloud environment is one of confidence in the technology (or lack thereof).

Once they understand the concept and see the benefits of the cloud in terms of availability, elasticity and cost, many SMEs dig deeper.

For the majority of SMEs a cloud environment is ideal - it removes the burden of technology and introduces cost-savings and flexibility.

From experiences gained throughout 2009 I'm expecting 2010, particularly the latter half, to be the real beginnings of cloud technology in the SME market.

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