Barriers to the Cloud

I just spotted an interesting post over on James Urquharts blog.  It echo’s a few conversations I’ve had recently about how enterprises might start to adopt cloud solutions and how they can prepare themselves for a future where services are delivered outside of their own data centres.

I think that James is right, the existing investments companies have made in on-premise solutions and infrastructure are definitely a barrier to wholesale migrations to a cloud model.  This does however provide a migration path for those organisations that are investigating cloud options for the provision of services and are looking to test the waters a little before jumping in.

At the moment there aren’t too many services available from the cloud in a cost effective way – at least from the big players that large enterprises will look to deal with.  At the moment I reckon that the demand for cloud type solutions far outweighs the markets ability to deliver them. 

As existing on-premise services start to age I think we’ll see a service-by-service migration to those cloud services that are mature and have a cost effective billing models.  For some services this will work out well, but for others the market won’t be ready and the services will enter another life/depreciation cycle as on-premise solutions. 

It’s great to see VMWare et al creating solutions that will help enterprises ‘cloud enable’ these next generation of on-premise solutions.  I’m looking forward to seeing quite how these solutions will develop.

Check out James’ full post over on his blog: http://blog.jamesurquhart.com/2008/12/enterprise-barrier-to-exit-to-cloud.html

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