Michael Healey recently wrote “8 questions to ask before going live in the cloud“. Good read. We see customers going through this  general thought process:

• what is the business driver (generally time to market or costs) ?
• what is the ‘pilot’ application (new application are easier)
• select team, infrastructure/platform provider.
• focus on the security/compliance/visibility
• deliver project
• measure ROI (generally not required, as it is obvious)
• move to mission critical application

Most enterprise cloud applications are being driven by business/IT folks are focused on helping their business counterparts on time to market. it is important to approach w/ caution, but try to jump in fast…the water feels fine after you are in . No big bang approach about replacing data centers etc., just start with baby steps.

- 50% of all folks interviewed (enterprises with more than $1B in revenue) are doing cloud computing
- 66% of those do not have a security strategy
- RSA has put together a “Security for Business Innovation” council comprised of 10 security executives chosen by RSA.

Kudos to RSA for taking a customer centric approach. There is a shift happening in enterprise computing, it is becoming Web centric. The Web has been very successful in creating de facto standards without formal standard bodies, hopefully we have learned from it. Much like the Web, cloud computing adoption will have a life of it is own. Instead of trying to control it, lets guide it.

At Sonoa we completely agree with Jonathan’s assessment. As with all inflections points, we will only know after we have passed it, but it certainly fees like we have either reached or close to reaching a maturation/tipping point.

Sonoa provides visibility, control and scale for APIs, feeds and services. We provide this on premise and on demand. In addition to the technology discussions, increasingly we have two kinds of requests from our customers: 1. API strategy – what are the different phases of an API strategy, should I just make them available and see what happens, etc., and 2. API Development – what best practices does one use in order to have simple to use and scalable APIs. As Jonathan points out in his blog creative/media agencies will be of little help. Maybe there is an opportunity for boutique SI firms or for large consulting firms to start a practice.

SOA is an approach. Much like OOP (object oriented programming). Make building and maintaining IT systems more efficient.

Cloud Computing is about enabling technology. Much like Client/Server or Web Computing, the drivers are costs and time to market/revenue.

ALL customers that we talk to get the difference. Not sure why there is so much confusion.

Another big benefit to enterprise cloud adoption will be a survival of the fittest among business – you really do need to start the move to the cloud to stay a viable business in today’s climate where the slightest edge means everything.

The operational and business consultant sides of the CIO won’t necessarily separate as Gray indicates. Yes, a lot of operational aspects are handled for you when you move to the cloud, but there is still very real work to be done in maintaining security and control in the cloud that is directly related to C-level business efforts. No doubt we’ll see the position of the CIO evolve, but the role is still vital to business & IT operations.

- Enterprise customers will claim that they have been doing private cloud computing. Have noticed that in our discussion w/ customers also. Even though this does fit w/ the virtualization part of the definition of privates clouds, it is hard to argue w/ them.

- Private/public clouds – interoperability between private and public cloud implementations has to be seamless – security, privacy issues have to be worked out. We have seen an increasing need for ‘gateway’ type technology to solve this issue. We’re already offering a cloud gateway solution at Sonoa – stay tuned on plans for a bigger product line .

Vishal is a smart dude, he needs to get out there and talk about cloud
computing more often.

Let me start by saying every customer that I have talked to in the past 12 months says – that they will be going with a hybrid approach – combination of public and private clouds. The following are few things to think about before you decide on how you want to proceed.

- Type of enterprise – if you are a Web-based business, then public cloud is a no brainer. Regulated industries like insurance and now financial services will have a tougher time to go only w/ public clouds. So you might start with a VMware-based private cloud offering and then as you decide to use or expose APIs/services to customers/partners or your compute cycles for a point project are exponentially high, you might opt for adding the public cloud to your strategy.

- Use case – what you are doing will define how you do it. If the data is very sensitive and cannot leave the firewall, then you might decide to start with the private cloud. Just remember that is what people said about sales/forecast data. Salesforce.com is thousands of customers and their data seems pretty secure. Nevertheless, security of the data will be important criteria in deciding the private vs. public discussion.

- Cloud provider type – self services (l EC2, Google) or high touch (Rackspace, Sunguard, etc.). This is mostly about how you would like to access services. High touch has its benefits, but is also expensive. Over a LONG period of time the lines will blur, but at least for the next decade the difference in approach will be stark.

- Control – this goes back to the use case discussion above. Enterprises will want visibility and control. Granular control on things like authentication, authorization, data masking, etc. As with much of the Web/cloud approach, it has to be simple and has got to scale.

Now for the controversial part. Much has been said about the Google outage. Recently blogged about it here. Rob Enderle recently used the Google outage to assert that private cloud models will win over public cloud models. Even though he makes good points, it is not what our customers are telling us.. This is not an either or discussion. Enterprise customers will do both.