Many can agree that the term cloud is getting over-used. It’s the hottest of
hot topics in IT right now and everyone seems to be searching for a piece of the pie. Companies are offering anything from tools, platforms and storage to the actual compute within in the cloud, all in hopes of bringing in just a portion of what some say will be billions of dollars that is sure to be made the cloud computing industry.
While the buzz word is new, the actual technology and idea is not. It just wasn’t named right before. Cloud-based services had names like ASP – “Application Service Provision,” or “network-distributed parallel processing.” The word cloud symbolizes the idea much more eloquently. It’s much easier for someone to understand the analogy of putting something in a “cloud” than trying to get what those other techie and uncanny terms were referring to before, especially for business leaders who aren’t all that techie themselves.
At
BlueLock we had some similar “naming” problems at the get go. What were we to call this service that it seemed no one else was providing? We knew one thing: we provide IT infrastructure. And another: what we do is very service oriented. And so, Pat O’Day, our CTO who I like to think as basically an IT genius, coined the phrase “
Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) back in 2006. He actually authored the very first entry in Wikipedia for that term which has since received more than 500 additions and updates as the technology has evolved.
And with all the virtualization that made up our offerings we realized shortly thereafter what we provided was cloud computing (our cloud is a total
VMware virtualized cloud), with an IaaS business model. We called it "distributed computing," "managed dedicated hosting," and other terms that were correct, just not very catchy... but at the end of the day it was cloud computing.
But what we didn’t provide was an Amazon or Rackspace or Google cloud, it was something much different. It was something that included more of a relationship, not just a click of a button that allowed you to access the “cloud.” We manage IT services.
The thing that makes us different is the fact that we listen to your needs, walk you through the development of your IT environment, consult you on your different choices and what makes the most sense for you. If we listen and hear that you need an Amazon or Rackspace cloud, we’ll tell you.
Managed cloud hosting isn’t for everyone, just like tax advisors aren’t for everyone. Some people like to do it themselves and others like to make sure they’re getting every ounce of benefit they can from their efforts and have someone to go to when they have questions, tricky situations, or they just want someone else to be held responsible.
Thankfully at BlueLock we’ve got responsible
people. Now it’s just a question of “your people or mine?”
Focus your great people on the IT infrastructure or your great people on the core goals of your business? For some it’s an easy question to answer … and they will be the ones whose businesses develop stronger and faster than yours.
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So what is enterprise cloud computing? How is it so different from (regular) cloud computing?
Because we needed another "top" list, I'd love to go through David Linthicum's latest list, "Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010."
Server virtualization not only makes sense economically, but also environmentally. Is your organization dedicated to a green initiative? Recycling, biking and other green trends will definitely make an impact, but not quite as much as an impact if your IT virtualizes its infrastructure. Green IT is growing in importance and virtualization is easiest way to get your company on board with the movement.
