Taking Advantage of Public and Private Clouds Requires the Right Cloud Management Software
Cloud computing is just a few years old, but already has given rise to two separate approaches and architectures; one public, like Amazon's Web services, the other private, usually inside a corporate data center. Computer users assigned to business units are attracted to the direct access and easy provisioning of the public cloud, since servers can be up and running in a few minutes. IT organizations, on the other hand, value the security and control they associate with private clouds, and worry about the proliferation of public cloud instances and its potential impact on corporate data and security policies. It's a familiar tug-of-war.
Successful businesses have lately come to realize that both public and private clouds have advantages, and want to make able to use both of them when appropriate. Consider Intuit, the software company does the load testing for its online TurboTax program on servers at Amazon; because real customer data is not being used, there are no regulatory or privacy issues. However, once the software is made available to the public it runs on Intuit's on-premises machines, as one would expect for information of such a sensitive nature.
Being able to move between public and private clouds in this manner requires the right kind of cloud management software, a true "Cloud Operating System" that doesn't take a one-size-fits-all approach to cloud architecture. Instead, it must make use of, when appropriate, the growing number of cloud technologies the marketplace is accepting.
In a properly designed Cloud Operating System, an application runs in either the public or the private cloud depending on the application itself, in connection with company policies. These policies might involve, for example, the kinds of data the application uses, or the extent to which the application is mission-critical to the organization.
The actual placement of an individual application's workload in either the public or private cloud should occur automatically and transparently to end users. Be they in IT or in business units, users should concern themselves only with choosing the proper policy for the workload. Cloud management software should then take over, determining where precisely in the public-private cloud ecosystem the program will run.
This means that to be effective a Cloud Operating System software needs to shield users from the multitude of different command systems they currently need to master to move between public and private clouds. Instead the software must present a unified user experience, with the same authorization, the access control and interfaces regardless of the workload's final destination. Users can focus on their workload needs using credentials set up centrally by IT. That protects the enterprise from employees disclosing their credentials to others, or worse, taking them with them when they leave the organization.
A Cloud Operating System must also give users a painless way to move data and applications back and forth between public and private clouds. That's a seemingly straightforward task, but one whose current complexity routinely leads to lengthy and unexpected delays in what IT workers had assumed was going to be a straightforward migration process.
