Page 90 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

becoming more cloudlike. The users of these internal, or pri-
vate, clouds, as opposed to the users of the publicly accessible
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google App Engine,
and Microsoft Azure, will not be members of the general pub-
lic. They will be the employees, business partners, and cus-
tomers of the business, each of whom will be able to use the

internal cloud based on the role he plays in the business.
InformationWeek, which tries to be out front in addressing
the interests of business computing professionals, first aired the
concept of private clouds as a cover story on April 13, 2009,
after hearing about the idea in background interviews over
the preceding months. In July, Rackspace announced that it
would reserve dedicated servers in its public cloud for those

customers seeking to do “private” cloud computing. In Au-
gust, Amazon Web Services announced that it would offer spe-
cially protected facilities within its EC2 public cloud as the
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.
These developments set off a debate inside InformationWeek
and among cloud proponents and critics throughout the busi-
ness world. John Foley, editor of the Plug into the Cloud feature
of www.informationweek.com, asked the question: How can a
public cloud supplier suddenly claim to offer private cloud

services? Weren’t shared, multitenant facilities awkward to re-
define as “private”? Some observers think that a public cloud
can offer secure private facilities, but any sensible observer
(and most CEOs) would agree with Foley’s question. How
good is a public cloud supplier at protecting “private” opera-
tions within its facilities? In fact, there are already some pro-
tections in place in the public cloud. There is no slop-over of

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