Page 92 - 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

Analytics,“Cloudcomputingprovides...anunsettlinglevel
of uncertainty about where our data goes, how it gets there
and how protected it will be over time.” (See Appendix B.)
Because of these concerns, the security of the cloud is the
first question raised in survey after survey whenever business
leaders are asked about their plans for cloud computing. And

that response is frequently followed by the conclusion that
they’d prefer to first implement cloud computing on their
own company premises in a “private cloud.”
On the face of it, this is an apparent contradiction. By our
earlier definition, cloud computing invokes a new business
model for distributing external computing power to end users
on a pay-as-you-go basis, giving the end user a degree of pro-

grammatic control over cloud resources and allowing new
economies of scale to assert themselves. At first glance, the idea
of achieving competitive economies of scale trips up the no-
tion of a private cloud. With a limited number of users, how
will the private cloud achieve the economies of scale that an
EC2 or Azure does?
Nevertheless, I think many private enterprises are already
seriously considering the private cloud. Until they understand
cloud computing from the inside out, these enterprises won’t

risk data that’s critical to the business.
If the on-premises private cloud offers a blend of aug-
mented computing power and also guarantees of data protec-
tion, then it is likely to be pressed into service. Its owners will
have made a conscious trade-off between guaranteed data
security in the cloud and economies of scale. A private cloud
doesn’t have to compete with EC2 or Azure to justify its exis-

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