Virtual Private Clouds

 Where does the web, now in early adulthood, go from here?  The answer is up in the clouds!  Now that we are always on and always connected with eachother the web can play a new role for both consumers and enterprise.  The web can become what our computers couldn’t quite handle on their own.  The web will soon become THE source for just about all content.  By storing all your content and other data on the web we are able to move more feely around the world without the shackles of a specific machine that holds that data for us.  Cloud Computing makes us more mobile as well as more agile in the long run and so will become the standard practice for consumers and enterprise.  Lets look at enterprise:

There are several models for how this might happen.  Creating a virtual IT storehouse on the web where many IT functions, hardware, and services are wholly controlled by the enterprise is deemed an Internal Cloud.  In many ways this is the “baby step” approach advocated by those who beleive IT groups will resist any change to their authority or control.  While  providing on-demand resources, pay-as-you-go pricing, and the appearance of infinite scalability, a private cloud doesn’t quite provide the economies of scale that you might see from an approach that “upsources” the whole shebang to a Public Cloud. 

A Public Cloud is a more radical and controversial approach.  By almost completely eliminating the requirements of a traditional IT department in favour of a publicly maintained environment, an organisation could limit their IT department to simple management of data via an access method as simple as a browser or similar terminal application.   This is a revolutionary approach as compared with the evolutionary approach of an Internal Cloud.  While economies of scale and overall cost reduction are chief benefits, other risks such as security do remain. 

This leads many to the inevitable conclusion that the answer is to take the public cloud and cordon off a place for the enterprise to access and control.  The idea of  “upsourcing” to the web but still maintaining control is called a Private Cloud.  A Private Cloud takes advantage of some of the economies of scale that the Public Cloud offers but retains some of the security and control of an Internal Cloud at a more reasonable cost.  Resources may be owned by the enterprise, consumed from a public cloud provider, or some combination of the two.

My view is that Private Cloud’s will evolve into what I call a Virtual Private Cloud.  Private Cloud’s still carry a higher cost than a completely public cloud and so the unending quest to reduce cost will drive data to become dispersed into the public domain but retain security and access rights.  This won’t happen overnight as a lack of security protocols and the inertia of today’s IT departments will resist it until their last dying gasps.   But eventually, as it always does, efficiency and cost reduction will win out and all of our data will be thrown into the wind to be gathered into the cloud for your consumption on demand.