In part 1 of this series, Four Cornerstone has touched on the status of cloud computing and how businesses are adopting the solution that are available to them on the platform. Basically, we found that private clouds are getting more and more favored than public clouds and we are seeing the decline of onsite deployments.

All is well and good when it comes to cloud computing. But as we have indicated before, businesses need to find solid proof that they would not get into trouble when they get into the cloud. In short, what are the guarantees and requirements that businesses are looking for in their cloud service providers?

The first requirement may surprise you. But even as the cloud is touted as high and advanced technology, most business and IT leaders are looking for old school data center capabilities. For one, public cloud users want complete isolation from other customers who share their resources and the larger the company is the more important this isolation gets. Businesses need to comply with regulations and they also need to protect their data as well as attend to other security issues with their computing environments. Another requirement for the public cloud is to have guarantees when it comes to service level and access control using identity management. Plus the public cloud platform should be able to easily integrate with the applications that are running outside of it.

For private clouds, businesses are more concerned with disaster recovery and business community, as well as the same service level guarantees as needed with public clouds. Businesses also want to have easy to use tools and software that would help them maintain, manage and monitor the platform and their applications. Lastly, businesses would need to see tight integration between the private cloud and the on-premise database.

Further, respondents indicated that having a standard for both public and private cloud would mean interoperability between different systems, operating systems and languages. Businesses wanted interoperability so that they could use the same code and standards to deploy their applications on the cloud. This will also help them become more flexible, save on costs and ensure scalability of their systems.

Application portability is also a concern. Businesses would need to know how easy it is to migrate their applications to the cloud, especially the mission critical ones, or those that have high-level security requirements.

What do all these mean? IT professionals know their cloud and they know the difference between each, its strengths and weaknesses. It also reveals that IT managers are critical about the move to the cloud and meticulous in their decisions.

For now the biggest roadblocks for migrating to the cloud are the mitigation risks that the cloud would not be able to deliver the same level of performance, security and availability as on-premise systems, as well as the lack of ability and existing tools to deal with the cloud. But as standards-based platforms and tools become more and more mainstream in the cloud space, businesses would be able to look past their trepidations and doubts. This plus being able to secure guarantees for performance, scalability and integration would help the decision to get onto the cloud even easier.

But why wait? Let Four Cornerstone help you deploy your data center, applications and operation on the cloud. Call us today at 1 (817) 377 1144 and find out how you could do all these without the stress!

Photo by Blue Coat Photos.