Public cloud computing is thriving. With Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings introduced by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google’s Google Apps, businesses quickly found the cloud’s simplified cost and consumption models a huge productivity kick, enabling faster, more nimble systems development and new business opportunities through reduced-capital expenditures.

Then IT managers started asking, “Why can’t I run my own cloud--my own private cloud?” Enterprise data center staff discovered that private cloud infrastructure--with the same à la carte-provisioning, internal pricing, and streamlined management as public counterparts--is actually a terrific way to run IT. End users become customers (happy ones at that), because they get faster application provisioning and more control over their application environments.  IT likes the idea of shifting application expertise to departmental users who likely have more expertise in selecting and operating their applications anyway. Executives love the smaller staff sizes, smoother IT budget processes, and the business agility that comes with a flexible private cloud infrastructure.

In contrast, after their initial brightness, public clouds started showing a darker lining: Several major outages lasting up to several days, as well as serious security breaches called public cloud reliability and safety into question. Some critical applications with legally-enforced security requirements, such as financial and healthcare systems, were deemed too demanding to trust to the public cloud. In fact, virtualization (the key technology underlying public cloud capabilities) carries within it an insurmountable (so far) vulnerability: the cloud operator can get at any customer’s most secret data, including passwords and encryption keys, by simply “snapshotting” a cloud-resident virtual machine, and the customer can never tell a compromise occurred.

As a result, public cloud adoption in the enterprise has slowed, while private cloud deployment has soared. Businesses, including yours, almost certainly have a private cloud in their futures. The questions are (1) when you’ll adopt a private cloud infrastructure, (2) how you’ll move your day-to-day operations into it, and (3) what, if any, advantage you can take of public cloud capabilities. By learning what drives early adopters to the private cloud and how to begin your own cloud journey, you’ll be better prepared to answer those questions.

Private vs Public

In March of 2011, the Idata center surveyed some 9,000 current cloud solution users to see what types of cloud deployment were most popular. The answer was surprising: Private cloud infrastructure accounted for nearly 60% of ongoing cloud operations (Figure 1), while public IaaS ran in less than 20% of the businesses surveyed. While public SaaS services, such as Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and NetSuite, account for more than half of public cloud deployments, private cloud is still a stronger operating model. The most recent cloud innovations, public Platform-as-a-Service (PasS) services (such as Microsoft’s Azure), have almost as much traction as public IaaS, despite being much younger offerings. PaaS is a cloud model to keep your eye on, while public IaaS may be fading into least-favored status.

A private cloud automates the management and deployment of virtual machines, virtual storage, and networking resources. IT essentially buys these commodities in bulk, pours them into the private cloud data center, and then doles them out to users through the private cloud’s highly automated provisioning systems, which include detailed cost recovery features to ensure internal business units pay their fair share of the IT bill. It’s more complicated than that, of course: A successful private cloud is a carefully designed and tuned assembly of compatible, complimentary parts, not an ad-hoc hodgepodge of disparate servers, switches, and disk drives. Many businesses don’t have the in-house expertise to build a private cloud data center from scratch, but they almost certainly have the expertise to run one--and with fewer people than currently employed in a traditional virtualized data center.

But just as the company president can rent a corporate jet to assist his or her business objectives, IT can lease or buy ready-made “in a box” private cloud solutions. Nearly every major hardware vendor offers such bundles, and both major hypervisor sellers, Microsoft and VMware, have partner programs that bring server, storage, networking, and software tool makers together to build private cloud solutions around their respective Hyper-V and vSphere virtualization platforms.

Given Moore’s famous law of progress with computational hardware, which postulates that the number of transistors in integrated circuits double every two years, private cloud solutions in a single chassis seem inevitable. In fact, Microsoft and Google now proudly show off their containerized data centers that fit in a portable semi-trailer form factor, and today you can buy a small cloud-in-a-rack sporting 128 compute cores and a 100 TB SAN for less than $100,000, a cost that compares quite favorably to the mainframe budgets of yore (which required ten times the staffing levels of a private cloud). How long can it be before a private cloud fits in a breadbox?

To be sure, public clouds will continue to exist and grow, and businesses will still find value in the low capex ability to spin up massive compute and storage facilities on a moment’s notice. So while the clear trend is for private clouds to be the core IT resource, we must be able to exploit the public cloud and integrate it into our businesses along side our private clouds.

The Path to Integrated Cloud Happiness

The cloud in your future, whether private or public, won’t happen on its own. You must consciously begin traveling a path to a cloud existence, incorporating needs assessment, planning, product evaluation, and staff education. You’ll also have to prepare your user population to assume some application-level responsibilities in their own business units. Here are six key steps to successfully transitioning to an effective private, public, or hybrid cloud:

1. Identify business objectives that cloud-oriented IT can address better than a legacy data center. For instance, you might want to reduce IT project backlogs by transferring application expertise to the end-user organization, which would require empowering them with on-demand computing. Alternatively, you may seek to enhance business continuity by shifting the most critical backup business processes to the cost-effective public cloud, which costs little until you need it. A useful way to gain insight into potential cloud opportunities is to create an informal brainstorming committee to meet a fixed number of times. Keeping management in the loop during this assessment will help you gain buy-in for the subsequent steps on your cloud itinerary.

2. Create a one- to two-year plan for pairing business modernization requirements with potential real-world cloud deployments. One or two projects never justify a private cloud build-out, but ten or twenty will. Your plan should consider both IaaS and SaaS offerings for business-unit users. For instance, a manufacturing unity may want to build its own ERP server from VMs that you provision and deliver to them. A marketing unit may be interested in its own email system, but only at the level of configuring email services and options and not at installing operating systems and databases. The former needs IaaS from your private cloud; the latter wants SaaS.

3. Begin evaluating available cloud solutions by building a library of potential product acquisitions. When possible, try out demo versions of administrative software to get you and your staff familiar with the knobs and dials of private and public cloud administration. Often, vendors have virtual appliances containing fully-functional demonstration packages that you can “spin up” in a minute on your desktop.

4. Look for cost-saving opportunities that exploit cloud facilities, either through more efficient service delivery, lower staffing levels, or both. Although your endpoint is likely a private cloud, you may find the low startup costs of public cloud IaaS can solve an immediate business problem that will then become a candidate for transition to your future private cloud.

5. Start implementing the management software infrastructure for cloud computing immediately. For instance, instead of running a traditional “trouble ticket” system for IT support, switch to a private cloud provisioning package that can interface with your existing virtualized infrastructure for the time being. The open source project OpenStack (openstack.org) offers an array of server, storage, OS image, and dashboard components that let you gain experience with both private and public cloud operations immediately.  

6. Enumerate the security and reliability requirements of every application system your enterprise currently runs, assessing each application’s most viable cloud environment--private or public. Some applications may have security restrictions dictated by corporate governance rules like PCI-DSS or HIPAA, letting you instantly classify them as private-cloud-only. Others may be able to operate in a public cloud with private cloud backup facilities (or vice-versa) to achieve the reliability levels they need. A third category may lack either reliability or security sensitivity, in which case you can mark them as candidates for either cloud. With this cloud candidate inventory at hand, you’ll be better prepared to jump on cloud opportunities when they arise.

The Cloud End Game

Now that private cloud computing is definitively the new best friend of IT growth and cost containment, now is the time to start raising cloud consciousness among your business and technology colleagues and start enlisting their help in planning for an eventual move to your own private cloud. At the same time, public cloud resources are available today and require almost no capital investment to use. You can leverage the public cloud to begin assessing potential private cloud management tools and provisioning systems. You’re only six steps away from “prepared.”