October 14, 2010, 11:58 AM — GRAPEVINE, Texas -- A Birmingham, Mich.-based financial services firm that manages some $13 billion in assets, is turning to a private cloud after determining that public cloud technologies aren't yet ready to meet its needs.
Jeffrey Lass, network operations and virtualization engineer at the company, which he asked not be identified, said that public clouds aren't yet a good option because of regulatory issues around the control of data, a lack of adequate service level agreements with cloud providers, and an absence of standard agreements that "allow freedom of movement between providers."
Lass also cited a lack of IT control when a company relies on public cloud services. "We really don't want to be in a position to have to shrug and say 'I don't know' when a system is running slowly," he said at the Storage Networking World conference here this week.
The company decided to create "a private cloud that has many of the same characteristics of a public cloud but with much higher control, security and availability," said Lass.
IDC analyst Richard Villars said that while his firm projects that the cloud computing market will grow from $23 billion today to about $55 billion in 2014, much of the growth so far has been in new hosted services. Most enterprises aren't yet replacing existing applications with cloud-based offerings, he said.
Villars did note that only a small fraction of spending on cloud systems is for private cloud development.
Villars said the primary issue IT managers face in creating a private cloud is whether to invest in needed converged infrastructure so all the IT assets, storage, servers, networks, are treated as a common resource pool that can be metered and managed in coordinated fashion.
The cost of such an infrastructure is substantial and may be the top obstacle to creating private clouds, according to an IDC survey of users earlier this year. IT departments have money for servers, storage, but not converged infrastructures, said Villars.
At the same time, public cloud computing remains a difficult sell, particularly in regulated industries. For sure, many companies are using hosted services as well as some infrastructure services, such as testing and development. But cloud vendors must still make the case to convince enterprise IT managers to broadly expand use of cloud technologies.
John McGee, a data center manager for regional hospital system, said he is attending the conference to learn more about the cloud environment. At this point, though, "we're not thrilled about [public clouds]," he added.
McGee said his IT environment is still "one throat to choke, mine."
