Much of what we read on the web today around cloud computing focus’s on the big US providers with their massive data centre capacity, most of which is centred around providing ‘services’ to consumers – IM, email, on-line photo galleries, backup etc. A lot of what’s written would also lead us to believe that many IT departments are going to ditch all their internal IT equipment, servers, storage etc and move wholeheartedly into the cloud.

I suspect in reality the situation is somewhat different.

For many IT organisations the first step in the direction of cloud computing will be to virtualise their existing infrastructure and workloads to provide ‘cloud-like ‘ services internally to their organisation.  Once this model has been established it then becomes viable to consider moving some non-business critical workloads out onto computer resources operated by third parties, i.e. external or public cloud services, whilst still retaining high degree of control over the application stack and data.

For smaller organisations without a comprehensive internal IT infrastructure the situation may be somewhat different as cloud services provides them with the option of accessing software functionality form the cloud without having to setup up and maintain themselves; these could vary from email systems, office productivity applications and all the way to complete ERP solutions.

So, are you planning your first cloud deployment and what will it be – an internal cloud or will you go the whole way and into the great unknown of the public cloud ??

If you want to find out more about your options for deploying cloud computing the IT Expo in London ( 7-8 Oct @ Earls Court ) is a good place to start, there’s also the opportunity to hear Intel experts talking about virtualisation and future compute models.