Crescendo's Web Application Performance Blog

2 weeks ago I participated in a cloud event called "Powering the Cloud". As much as it sounds like hype, the cloud is actually marching on. The most important fact that allows it to succeed is it's evolutionary nature to virtualization, not a disruptive revolution!

Virtualization has already gone mainstream where almost every IT organization is either using it or considering.

Data by Gartner suggests that via virtualization, organizations can fundamentally change their server to admin ratios - from 20-30 to 1 in the physical world to 60-100 to 1 in the virtual world. The IT world agrees.

Cloud is supposed to go one step further, achieving even more savings by allowing IT to automate processes further as well as farm out key parts of their infrastructure to 3rd parties that can achieve greater economies of scale and thus achieve even more savings.

For customers, since the step to cloud is evolutionary from their regular virtualization infrastructure, they can experiment with small projects to build confidence and test the water. This is already happening today.

A striking example was provided at the event. It involved a company that wanted a new backup redundancy system to their SAP system and compared building a new one internally to hosting one externally using cloud services. They had clearly defined goals of how much data they can lose in case of failure (less than 1 hour) and how quickly the backup system needs to be up (within 20 minutes).

Backup thus had to constantly replicate data from their systems and their servers had to be replicated at the remote hosted site. They ended up choosing the cloud implementation due to significant costs savings, but also gained additional benefits of their disaster recovery with at a remote site and savings in renewing their hardware every few years.

To me, this is a great example of small steps customers can take to test the water. It also highlighted the future is not about private cloud or public cloud but a mesh comprised of private resources where control is critical, and public resources, where possible, that can improve the internal infrastructure on many aspects and introduce additional costs savings not possible internally.