What's so great about cloud computing?

As everyone is probably well aware of now, the recent Amazon S3 storage cloud outage sent a ripple effect through the minds of every organization that uses cloud services today or that are contemplating incorporating public cloud services in the future.

The fallacy that something that is cheaper, faster, and more economical is necessarily better or more resilient has been exposed for what it is.

Cloud computing, for many arguments, is still in it’s infancy right now. Yes the progressive movement is to adopt subscription cloud services where possible to take advantage of the opex cost model, but in many ways and in many cases, critical workloads are not yet prime candidates for the public cloud model.

Because of events and issues like the Amazon S3 outage, organizations will continue to run critical application workloads in their own data centers or co-locations but under the watchful eyes of their own badged employees or dedicated consultants, who are solely dedicated to their organizations livelihood. That means they will only focus on and be watchful of their organizations critical workloads and not be burdened with tending to the cattle of multiple organizations disparate applications and data.

In many ways, the shared public cloud model works and makes sense for certain data sets and application types. But continued adoption of cloud services for the sake of cost savings or by embolden leaders who view it as the bright new thing to do to have their ego highlighted will soon come to the realization that cloud is not the end all be all for business growth.

Where it makes sense, smart leaders will adopt and take full advantage for what cloud services can bring to an organization but they will do so with a cautious hand. They will make sure that beyond the glitz and glamour of “We’re using the cloud” they align their use with the short and long term business goals of their organization. They will take the time to create a vision for the future with their cloud providers so as technology and economic tides shift, their cloud providers services and the relationship they build will shift with them.

So make no mistake here, individual organization’s data centers are not going away any time soon. They will however look very different than they do today. The augmentation of the data center is here and cloud will undoubtedly be a big part of that augmentation.