vate enterprise. Public cloud players
are quick to point out the scale issue
in their criticism of the private cloud
concept. Salesforce.com CEO Marc
Benioff urged attendees at this year’s
Cloudforce to “beware of the false
cloud. The false cloud is not efficient.”
With that said, there’s value in
maintaining your own private IT
resources—value that’s not easily
obtained from the public cloud, particularly where security, compliance
and legal discovery are concerned.
What’s more, a lack of public cloudsize scale doesn’t mean that organizations can’t derive real benefits from
organizing their infrastructure into a
more cloudlike form. For enterprises
already embracing x86 server consolidation to boost utilization and agility,
combining multiple departmental
virtual server farms into a single private cloud can, if executed well, lead to
more efficient use of these resources.
Do you prefer specialized virtualization tools, or do you prefer that your
existing tools have the capability to manage virtual infrastructures?
Have you decided on a virtualization management solution?
Virtualization & Cloud Computing Survey
Worried about security
The perceived weaknesses of
the public cloud approach typically
revolve around security, control and
demonstrating that both exist. The
paradigm of protecting data by securing it within the corporate perimeter is familiar to just about every IT
staffer. So, in many ways, the public
cloud is a challenge to the status
quo. Just as people love their privacy,
enterprises want to keep their clouds
private. We understand how to protect something that’s private.
“It isn’t necessarily [true] that public
cloud services are insecure by nature,
but rather that they are not under a
company’s direct control,” said Scott
Crenshaw, vice president and general
manager of the cloud at Red Hat.
“We know how to achieve compli-
ance with internal resources, but don’t
fully understand the ramifications of
doing so in a public environment.”
Even in private cloud environ-
ments, however, “multitenancy” is a
word that can strike fear in an IT secu-
rity administrator’s heart, particularly
admins who are responsible for audits
and compliance. According to Eric
Chiu, president and CEO of Hytrust,
“The challenge becomes how to thrive
in a multitenancy environment while
preserving VM and data segregation,
as well as separation of duties.”
Virtual firewalls such as Hytrust
allow administrators to logically
separate environments within the
private cloud. Similarly, Check Point
and Altor Networks apply security
policy in virtual environments.
Assess the current regulatory envi-
ronment and make sure you can
build a private cloud that is compli-
ant today as well in the future—or,
at least, that it can be updated when
future changes occur. Compliance
typically revolves around proving the
confidentiality, integrity and chain of
custody for sensitive pieces of data.
Organizations must demonstrate
compliance with regulatory require-
In a survey of more than 200 organizations, 70 percent prefer specialized virtual
tools over the addition of virtual features to existing network and data center
management tools. Yet, 73 percent haven’t decided on a virtualization management
solution. This shows a need for a virtualization management solution that is not cur-
rently being met. (Zenoss 2010 Virtualization and Cloud Computing Survey Report)
