private cloud

The public cloud computing market is becoming increasingly competitive with new entrants focusing on hybrid offerings that combine public and private clouds. That's leaving some asking the market-leading public cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, where its private cloud offering is.

Amazon pulled off a coup a few months back, reportedly securing a $600 million contract to build a cloud for the CIA.

Forrester cloud expert says many times IT isn't aware that public cloud resources are accessing information behind the company's firewall, leading to potential security and performance issues.

Perhaps the biggest selling point for VMware's newly announced hybrid cloud strategy -- and the reason it could be a game changer in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market -- is because of the common platform VMware customers will now have between their private cloud internal systems and this new VMware-operated public cloud.

JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) has completed the deployment of what is billed as one of the world's largest private cloud platform-as-a-service (Paas) projects.

In the cloud world of the future, some companies will want public cloud resources while others will want private clouds on their own premises, says Ashesh Badani, general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit. That's why Red Hat has a cloud strategy that incorporates both public and private platform as a service (PaaS) clouds, and it has big plans for those products this year.

Late last year Daniel Bozeman, a software engineer at wireless analytics firm Mosaik Solutions, wanted to build a private cloud. The company is a heavy user of Amazon Web Services public cloud resources, and Bozeman had a vision of creating a system that would allow him to seamlessly run workloads either in the company's own data center, or in Amazon's public cloud.

VMware's Cloud Foundry and Microsoft Azure are two of the leading platform as a service (PaaS) offerings from two cloud heavyweights, but one consultant says both companies are largely ignoring the private cloud market, creating a glaring hole for customers.

The De Vere hotel group has created a private cloud architecture to help consolidate its online brands.

The social games company sees Amazon Web Services as a 'four-door sedan' and its own network as a sports car

Cloud computing has gone from being a promising technology to a reality that brings a unique set of challenges along with benefits. To fully leverage the disruptive potential of cloud without getting trapped in a web of integration complexity, CIOs and their IT organizations need to focus on what it means to rethink their business as a collection of services.