I've examined the role of private clouds for quite some time. I have pondered over why private clouds are the most likely way mainstream IT organizations will implement cloud computing.

I don't think so anymore. Private clouds are not the future of cloud computing, and, in fact, will prove too daunting for IT organizations. One of the main assumptions is that they enable IT organizations to re-purpose existing infrastructure. But is that really true? The key to automating the bottom half of the chart - the infrastructure portion - is to use equipment that can be configured remotely with automated measures. This kind of functionality is the hallmark of up-to-date equipment. Unfortunately, most datacenters are full of equipment that does not have this functionality; instead they have a mishmosh of equipment of various vintages, much of which requires manual configuration. In other words, automating much of the existing infrastructure is a non-starter.

Attaining Cloud Nirvana

Worse, even if the datacenter equipment is mostly of recent vintage, additional investment will be necessary. Add-on equipment to manage networking and storage will be required for cloud capability. More capital investment is going to be required to get to the Nirvana of a private cloud. And in these economic times, where IT is slashing budgets, an initiative that calls for more investment is not really practical.

Second, what most vendors aren't saying right now is that, even if you're ready and capable of supporting incremental capital investment, a private cloud is not an easy-to-assemble arrangement like something from Ikea. In order to make all the pieces ready to work together and be provisioned in a holistic fashion, a great deal of manual work is required. Each of the vendors offers a range of professional services designed to help IT organizations get their cloud up and running. Left unsaid is the fact that creating a private cloud requires great slathers of expensive consulting. So, on top of the additional hardware costs, there will be additional fees for the vendor's personnel to "help you take advantage of your existing infrastructure."

The ambition to leverage existing infrastructure to create a low cost private cloud may be a chimera - a misguided vision of achieving vast improvement with little investment. Far more likely is vastly lowered marginal costs achieved by the investment of large amounts of capital and consulting.

Another thing that becomes clear if you look at the private cloud chart, is that there are lots of services that either don't exist today, or, if they do, are accomplished via manual processes. Just to take one example, policy. This is the function that determines whether an individual has the authority to request IT resources - a new server, storage, etcetera. Today, that is hashed out at some kind of project meeting, or an architectural review board, or something of the like. The infrastructure representative takes notes that a new system needs to be set up, leaves the meeting, sends one or more pieces of e-mail (or convenes another meeting) and ultimately, a new collection of compute resources is available. This is communicated back to the requesting party via an e-mail or, just as likely, in the next sit-down meeting. Finally, the requestor can get to work.

In a private cloud, the rules for who has authority to request resources must be captured in rules that can be checked during an automated request for resources. That is, someone fills out a Web form requesting compute resources, and the request flows in an automated fashion through a number of steps, one of which is a check to see whether the requestor has the authority to obtain resources.

All of this illustrates a fundamental fact about private clouds: For them to operate effectively, a huge number of informal and manual processes must be changed. Put bluntly, the operating assumptions of IT - the culture - require transformation, which makes the challenges of upgrading the equipment look small. The cost of human capital, embodied in processes and executed by emotion-laden individuals, each with their own motivations, dwarfs that of physical capital. The inertia to be overcome is enormous.

That brings us to our third issue - the disruption. Remember, all of this capital change-out and process disruption occurs in a setting of working systems. Every major IT organization has hundreds, even thousands, of applications. The amount of disruption imposed by the need to reconfigure all of the hardware and the disruption imposed on everyday working processes by the move to automate are mind boggling.

Related Articles

• Cloud Security: The basics
• Six Misconceptions About Cloud Apps
• How Not to Build a Cloud
• Cloud Computing can help Enterprises Save Big
• Where is Your Cloud? Four Compliance Best Practices

Latest Articles

• The Quiet Threat: Cyber Spies are Already in your Systems
• Responding to Security Questions Successfully
• Security Secrets the Bad Guys Don't Want You to Know
• Don't Wait for Adobe Sandboxing to Secure PDF Viewing
• The 4 Tiers of a Secure B2B Framework