What about “Virtual Private Clouds” ?

Amazon recently introduced what they call “Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)”. which basically is a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud.

The service is currently in public beta and is supposed to give companies a chance to re-use their existing IT investments while still leveraging the Amazon cloud computing offering. The EC2 instances will be isolated and connected through a secured VPN tunnel.

Graphic from  http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/introducing-amazon-virtual-private-cloud-vpc.html

This makes perfect sense for many companies that have spent big money on their computing and data center and cannot move into the cloud entirely in a big bang. This solution gives them the possibility to take a phased approach and move service by service into the cloud. Additionally the business critical systems (and the data) might be kept in-house if required.

Technorati Tags: Virtual Private Cloud,Amazon,VPC,AWS

Do “Private Clouds” make sense?

I actually should better ask “is a Private Cloud really Cloud Computing?”

Quite frankly i do not think that what Gartner and many others call a <Private Cloud> is anything near Cloud Computing. Agreed there is a trend towards virtualization and this makes perfect sense for large corporations – but Cloud Computing for me implies that the user (and even the IT department) does not know where the application or service is running and where data is stored.

The reason to use a Private instead of the Public Cloud is most of the times security related, i.e. I want to assure that sensitive data is not leaving the company in order to reduce risk or ensure compliancy with corporate policy or laws. Distributing the available internal computing power and the available storage across many users, apps, departments and locations is more or like a task of clever load-balancing. Some of the technology is probably similar to the one used in the Cloud, but all this is still very much in the control of corporate IT.
The fact that I am sure that the data does not leave the companies firewall shows that I always know where it actually (and physically) is. Isn’t this is an antagonism to the concept of Cloud Computing?

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Private Cloud,Public Cloud