Let??s All Dance the Cloud Two-Step - GigaOM

Let??s All Dance the Cloud Two-Step - GigaOM

So why are enterprise IT departments not running toward cloud computing to help scale resources and control costs? One oft-cited reason is that this technology is still in its infancy, but I think the real reason is that they are struggling to transform their traditional practices to ones that extend into the cloud. For example, if an IT department decides to outsource some of its processing power to Amazon like the Washington Post did, then how are those resources provisioned, monitored for faults and performance issues, secured against break-ins and accessed by both internal resources and third-party partners? There are some cloud solutions for these issues, but enterprise IT has spent decades building integrated internal systems and needs a way to bridge the gap from what they are using today to the cloud.

That??s where the cloud two-step comes in. The cloud two-step is a technology strategy that bridges the gap between traditional IT practices, ones that occur within the four walls of the enterprise, and the desire for IT practices that work under a new economic environment. It is a way to step into the cloud in two easy steps: the first to deploy technology within the enterprise that IT can fully control, the second to then use this technology to leverage clouds. Some examples include:

• a technology solution that configures enterprise network management systems (step one) to monitor faults and performance of cloud vendors (step two)
• software that configures virtual machines in an enterprise data center (step one) with an overflow option to offload processing to a cloud (step two)
• a new enterprise backup system (step one) that automatically provisions cloud storage when disk capacity reaches a certain threshold (step two)

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