j e s r u s h . c o m

Forrester has rolled out new cloud-computing survey results which turn some existing assumptions upside down! Among the findings:

Larger firms are more interested than smaller firms in leveraging external IaaS capability. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom that the SMB market will be the most eager adopter of cloud computing, because it will enable them to avoid extensive internal IT investment and skills.

Firms are slightly less interested in internal clouds than in external IaaS. By a margin of 10 percent, companies of all sizes prefer to focus on external providers rather than implementing a cloud internally. This is really surprising, for two reasons: (1) it indicates that companies feel they have enough information to make a decision, which is somewhat surprising given how early in the process we are; and (2) despite how early in the process it is, most companies are not opting for the “safer” choice, which is creating an internal cloud.

Interest in production app placement in external clouds is nearly as high as for test/dev. Again, the conventional wisdom is that companies will migrate test/dev to clouds as the initial use profile, because test/dev is often a pinch point in provisioning, requiring resources quickly and for indeterminate durations; the thinking goes that this type of use profile meshes well with cloud computing characteristics but also sidesteps other issues associated with external clouds like security, data privacy, and SLA needs.

Who knew?

A friend in IT recently asked me to explain cloud computing to them. It’s a complicated question because 1) personal cloud computing (think Sugar Sync, etc.) is very different from enterprise cloud computing (think Amazon S3, etc.) and 2) The vendors offering cloud services are offering really different products from each other.

I gave my friend the best summary which I could, but later I referred him to this old but excellent summary of the state of cloud computing. It has great great play-by-play on the offerings from each of the major vendors.

Things have shifted a little bit since then, but this is still the best summary I’ve seen on the web. And Amazon is still kickin’ everyone else’s butt with their simple image-based solution.