Quest for the Cloud

Over 80% of respondents to an F5 survey state they are currently at least in trial stages for a public or private cloud deployment. The survey indicates that cloud computing appears to have reached critical mass, but with a high level of confusion over what that actually means, it is difficult to say “Everybody is doing it” if we have trouble agreeing what “it” is.

As a product manager that focuses on enterprise-cloud products, this information doesn’t come as a surprise, but it does show just how much work there is to do both in educating customers and making sure their needs are being addressed – even if they don’t know what they are.

1. Access Control (90%)
2. Network Security (89%)
3. Virtualization (88%)

While the survey questions may have some level of slant (F5 is a company that focuses on network security products), my own research shows that these three things are in the top five no matter how you slice it.

What is interesting is that while a common definition of cloud computing eludes us even after all of this time, we are all very well aligned on what is really important to us at the end of the day. Security in today’s world does not mean blocking anything past the firewall, but having better auditing and policy management in place to ensure the right things make it through while still adhering to IT policy or compliance requirements.

What Cloud is Selling, or What IT Wants?

 This is an area where I don’t see pure-cloud vendors being able to address in the short-term. This is where I see “other” features of the cloud become over-hyped. Perhaps this is why the survey also shows that private clouds are gaining traction even though they do not provide all of the same benefits – some of those benefits are real and some are imagined.

As we get closer to true hybrid-cloud solutions, we will start to see a gelling of these ideas. I am willing to bet that once those types of compelling solutions become prevalent, we will converge on a real definition of cloud computing that focuses on what enterprise customers need from it rather than what pure-cloud vendors are putting into it.

Take a look at the survey and let me know your thoughts.