The Cloud is everywhere these days. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, it doesn’t matter what size company you operate and it doesn’t matter what your IT spending ability is, Cloud servers are in high demand. With more and more companies getting into the Cloud industry, more and more companies are coming to understand that while Cloud servers are a wonderful tool, there is a disconnect between the company and the provider in terms of what Cloud solutions provide.
What Companies Are Looking For
When a company looks to invest in the Cloud, they are typically looking for one of three things:
- Cloud severs supplying them the ability to host a scalable web site.
- Cloud storage solutions supplying scalable quantities of storage space.
- Private cloud networks which offer encrypted access, VPN connections and highly secure firewalls.
Without beating around the bush when companies invest in Cloud solutions, they are looking for a Cloud server which offers scalability, excellent pricing and the ability to run their day-to-day business operations from a remote data center location.
What Providers Supply
While companies are looking for the aforementioned, Cloud providers interpret corporate need in a different light. Because Cloud providers have been dealing in the web hosting industry since dedicated servers were all the rage, the IT men and women working in the industry view the Cloud through the lens of virtualization, not Cloud servers.
For the vast majority of IT companies, the Cloud means virtualization – not scalability, pricing and remote servers. This means, when a company asks to be put in the Cloud, providers supply them with the virtualized infrastructure the providers themselves interpret as the Cloud. Be it Xen, KVM, OpenVZ or Hyper-V, providers look at the “Cloud” as marketing jargon meaning nothing more than virtualization.
It goes without saying, but this disconnect between companies and providers is a problem.
Addressing the Cloud Computing Communication Problem
With both bodies interpreting the same IT solutions as two different products, how does the market meet in the middle? Do companies take the leap to understand the Cloud as virtualization and virtual compute environments/resources or do providers make the leap to supply the market with quick and easy to use Cloud servers for storage, security and website hosting needs?
The answer can be found somewhere in the middle.
For companies investing in Cloud solutions, they need to understand how virtualization technologies like KVM, OpenVZ, Hyper-V and Xen impact their local and remote compute capabilities. By understanding how virtualization solutions impact the technical capabilities of purchased Cloud solutions, companies will gain the ability to better administer their compute resources allowing for routing of resources when and where needed.
Likewise, providers need to reach the conclusion that most companies aren’t looking to understand how virtualization works or looking to understand how the backend of Cloud networking works. Rather, managed solution providers need to understand companies are looking for quick and easy remote hosting technologies which empower their day-to-day business needs by simplifying IT needs.