Is Cloud Computing for Dummies?

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A sure sign that a new technology or methodology has arrived is a “for Dummies” book on the topic. Industry analyst Judith Hurwitz recently completed “Cloud Computing for Dummies,” and posted the 10 things she learned while writing the book with her colleagues. Judith’s post includes great points about the current state of cloud computing and where it is headed:

1. Cloud computing is both old and new. It is an evolution of pre-existing technologies and services such as timesharing, internet services, application service providers, hosting, and managed services.

2. There are many shades of gray with segmentation between infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, and other buckets such as business process as a service.

3. Large companies such as IBM, HP, EMC, VMware, Microsoft, and others are entering the cloud-computing market with enterprise offerings to challenge established cloud vendors such as Amazon and Google.

4. The economic decisions to switch to cloud computing are complicated because it is not always practical to shut down existing on-premises systems that already include significant investments in hardware, software, personnel, and facilities.

5. The private cloud is real and is used to safely procure infrastructure, platform and software services in a self-service manner, by organizations that are unwilling or unable to entrust data to a third party.

6. The hybrid cloud is the future. Most companies will have a combination of private, traditional data centers, hosting, and public clouds.

7. Managing the cloud is complicated. Enterprise customers need to monitor service levels, and ensure compliance, security and privacy across the services they use.

8. Security is king in the cloud. Enterprise customers are concerned about the security implications of putting their valuable data into a public cloud. There are also legal issues with data crossing country borders, and concerns about the stability of cloud vendors.

9. Interoperability between clouds is the next frontier. Enterprise customers will want to be able to move their data and their code from one environment to another.

10. There is a trend toward packaging in the form of appliance-based environments or combining cloud offerings with hardware.

What are your observations about the current state and future technical and economic developments of cloud computing?