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“A divide as real as any weather front separates private, wholly owned data centers from public, capacity-for-hire cloud providers. There is a role for IT in creating a bridge across this divide as virtualization of all types enables more efficient application development, virtual machine provisioning and business continuity.”
This is the start of my feature story on bridging private and public cloud computing at eWEEK.com.
I’m much less interested in the rancorous debate about private vs. public (or even more rancorous, the flat out denial of any such thing as a private cloud) and much more interested in organizations pursuing the most cost-effective path to competitive IT advantage. Enterprises with a legacy investment in large data centers can’t just walk away from the investment. Virtualizing workloads, re-architecting flatter networks , and paying attention to seminal work from NIST and the newly formed Open Data Center Alliance will stand IT managers in good stead as they navigate the cloud computing landscape.
I’m especially interested in the work of the ODCA. After getting sidetracked by my regular editorial duties, I’ll return tomorrow to blogging my way through the usage guides by taking up the security monitoring paper. I invite you to read my previous analysis blogs on the ODCA including an overview of the organization and their take on carbon footprint, and virtual machine interoperability.
As I concluded in my feature, “Even though the idea of using private and public cloud resources in concert is new territory, the technique has potential as fertile ground for organizations that are in the market for a IT competitive edge.”