Despite years of industry advocacy, cloud adoption in larger firms remains slow. There are many logos for many vendors dotting the cloud technology landscape and many competing architectures. But there are also few standards that guarantee the interoperability of different approaches.
The latest buzz in enterprise cloud technology is around “hybrid cloud data centers” in which large enterprises “build their base” – that is, their core infrastructure, possibly as a “private cloud” – and “buy their burst” – that is, obtain additional public cloud- based resources and services to augment their on-premises capabilities during periods of peak workload handling, for application development, or for business continuity.
Ultimately, the adoption of cloud architecture will be gated by how successfully organizations are able to leverage emerging technologies in a secure and reliable manner and whether the resulting infrastructure actually delivers in the key areas of cost-containment, risk reduction and improved productivity.
