The Journey begins with the First Step

The journey to cloud computing begins with our existing infrastructure and applications. Good Grief Charlie Brown, we can't just throw everything out and start over "in the cloud". We need to leverage exisiting investments, skills, and to the extent possible, processes. Mostly, when you bring up uhet subject "cloud", people immediately think of public cloud offerings. There is a reason for that . First is "Pooling". Pooling is the activity that enables us to break down the traditional physical silos of infrastructure and create capacity pools of CBU, memory, storage, and networking - all aspects of the Data-center - to maximize our use of resources. Secondly, we want the cloud to be able to enable automated scaling up and scaling down of resource capacity to workloads efficiently - VMware referes to this as "Elasticity". Third is "Automation". To be a truly dynamic, on-demand environment, then it has to be fully automated. All of theses characteristics have a significant impact on lowering costs. They also provide the foundation for an infrastructure that will support the agility that a business stakeholder wants. In fact, some Agencies are factoring the process of "agility" into their Enterprise Architecture policies. Cloud Computing provides the right architecture to enable infrastructure on-demand.

However, I must admit that I am not a big fan of the public cloud as it currently stands in its maturity. Many of these clouds do not have an "exit" strategy and once you are in, you are not able to back out. Additionally, being a risk averse individual, I am not yet willing to relinquish my authority and responsibility for the security and privacy of my company's resources and employees to a third pary where I have no visibility as to how they maintain security. That being said, does not negate our goal of leveraging exisiting investments currently in place in the datacenter. The concept of the cloud architecture can be applied to our existing datacenter and the creation of a Private Cloud

But, infrastructure is only the begining of the journey and it is not prudent to think that consolidation of the servers in the data center amounts to cloud computing... The clip below gives you and idea of what VMware's vision is as to get to the cloud...