Private clouds are gaining far more attention than they did at the beginning of the cloud buzz phase, in part due to the perceived security issues involved with public clouds such as Amazon’s EC2, among others. However, while private clouds are gaining traction in the enterprise, not to mention in the media directed at IT decision makers, the reality of building a private cloud is far from simple, even if on the surface it seems like it shouldn’t be a complex, time-consuming and resource-heavy investment.
While most conversations around cloud computing hinge on the concept that it is a way to save money, some find themselves in over their heads when they actually make the leap into a private cloud, and not only from a cost perspective. Bill Claybrook from Computerworld noted that in addition to the surprising number of financial and time costs involved with the process, other concerns such as integration with public clouds, working with legacy systems, addressing reconfiguration needs, and even dealing with resistance to change on the part of IT are all factors that can make this process difficult.
Claybrook states that “indeed, transitioning from a traditional data center—even one with some servers virtualized—to a private cloud architecture is no easy task, particularly given that the entire data center won’t be cloud-enabled, at least not right away.”
While a large number of vendors are doing quite well by advertising their diverse abilities to make private clouds more approachable, many conversations that generate from these quarters dismiss the challenge that private cloud adoption can present.