I had the opportunity the other day to ask some enterprise customers their definition of the Cloud. Some of the initial responses I received mirror’s what I hear from my non-technical friends. A place to store stuff (data). For them, it’s the Public Cloud.
This response sheds light that we are still in the infancy of enterprise Cloud; even though use of the Cloud is skyrocketing. So it leads me to wonder, how many stranded applications, workloads and data are out on the Public Cloud; and do companies have a plan to ever get that information back?
Enterprises need to evolve their concept of the Cloud. The Cloud is not just the Public Cloud. The Cloud is not a destination at all. The Cloud is a transformational approach to IT. A concept that allows you to position IT not as a cost center, but as a solutions provider that delivers agility.
In its most agile form, Cloud allows enterprises to shift workloads between Private and Public Clouds in a Hybrid Cloud model. Implemented effectively, IT can create an environment that allows departments to self-provision applications. Those applications then can live in either a private or public cloud environment, and seamlessly move between environments based on factors of cost, value of the workload, compute requirements, and/or governance.
Enterprise Cloud 