The discussion surrounding cloud computing is escalating within the IT community. CIOs are analyzing how cloud computing can reduce costs, eliminate scale limitations, and improve agility. Almost like bugs attracted to a bright light, CIOs have expressed an immediate need to understand the potential impact of the cloud, while increasing the role of IT in business strategy.
Approaches vary, and organizations are at different points in private cloud or virtual data center adoption. It's been our opinion that the best approach today is to focus on internal data center offerings by taking advantage of significant opportunities to optimize virtualization across servers, storage, and networks (i.e., the virtual data center). And, eventually supplement that with private cloud attributes like defining service offerings, self-service provisioning, and metering results.
Huge benefits will be gained when building a virtualized platform for enterprise applications. These initiatives will position the organization to be able to take advantage of additional private and public cloud offerings in the future (if and when they make sense to the organization). Check out Datalink’s whitepaper, “Moving Toward a Virtual Data Center,” which outlines some of our best practices.