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Analyst Sees Cloudy Future for Private Cloud, OpenStack
Increasingly, businesses, government agencies, and other institutions want to move data centers and other IT projects to the cloud. But how much of this business will be attracted by the private cloud, as opposed to public operators such as Amazon's AWS? Corporate IT would prefer the the former, as it allows them to retain direct control over services, enforce standards of privacy and security, and (perhaps not least) provides more personally satisfying work, and greater career leverage with their employers.
But RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady is not bullish on the business prospects [redmonk.com] for the private cloud, nor OpenStack [wikipedia.org], its current frontrunning platform, for two reasons:
1. Most companies would not consider a private cloud to be one of their core competencies, either now or in the foreseeable future; Amazon and Google, who are also public cloud vendors, are exceptions that prove the rule. Corporations tend to outsource complex activities they don't consider core competencies.
2. The industry politics that helped propel OpenStack to the forefront of private cloud development in terms of attracting industry alliances and mindshare, will also make it difficult for the platform to coalesce around a coherent design. O'Grady:
It’s not difficult to understand that what a carrier might require from OpenStack, for example, could look very different from what an implementer would like to see. Neither of which is likely to be what an operating system vendor expects. And so on.
InfoWorld's Matt Asay (also Adobe's VP of Mobile) agrees, arguing that developers will increasingly make end runs around their corporate IT [infoworld.com] department, if necessary, to run projects out of AWS, Microsoft's Azure and other public clouds rather than live with the greater number of restrictions that seem inevitable with private cloud offerings, which will be hard-pressed to keep up with the pace of both business and technological innovations occurring in the public cloud space.
