Especially now that the "private cloud" has been deemed possibly real and useful by the cloud vendors.
The emergence of the private cloud is a major event in enterprise IT infrastructure. The argument against "private cloud" has been it may not be truly elastic, it may not be pay-as-you-go on a fine grained basis and has many discrepancies with how we are beginning to view public clouds.
In this case you have to look in the eye of the beholder, the enterprise IT exec. Most enterprise IT executives I know are pretty bright, and extremely realistic about the dysfunction that litters the corporate landscape. They know there are areas of activity they aren't good at, or are over-complicated, and usually even know why, but they can't necessarily change their organization. So when an enterprise guy says he "wants his own private cloud"...he is stipulating to the jury up front the following types of deformations in his environment:
- IT is a captive vendor to a captive customer
- IT is creating many "one of" products
- IT can't take on debt
- IT can't issue equity
- IT reports equally to multiple masters
- IT's multiple masters range from benignly ignoring each other to actively (and with mal-intent) attempting to damage each others operating division
- IT can't spend the total sum of money that its multiple masters ask it to spend
- IT is highly regulated and audited
- and more.......
My question is "Why are cloud land folks so pedantic on this point?" Putting in place one of the cloudy solutions available today and its associated loosely coupled automation infrastructures today gives that IT exec WAYYYY more bang for their buck than they get out of the big, over-complicated, baroque, metal provisioning solutions left over from the end days of the dot-com era.
My response is "good thinking guys, let's get you a private cloud and take it from there!"
