And the Survey Says
An IOUG survey shows strong interest in private
cloud computing.
Through our Research Wire program, the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG)
sponsors surveys to take the temperature of
IOUG membership regarding critical enterprise data management topics. We conduct
periodic and annual surveys, such as our
data security and data growth surveys, that
provide visibility into interesting data management trends. This year we also conducted
a survey on cloud computing.
The first thing that caught my eye in the
cloud survey results is that more than 40
percent of our members are already developing private cloud computing capabilities.
To me, this was a surprisingly large number.
Virtualization of database servers has been
a growing trend, but the 40 percent figure
for managing these servers as a private
enterprise cloud seemed high. After all, the
concept of cloud computing has only been
around for a short time.
So what is the difference between cloud
and virtualization? To me, virtualization
is a technology that enables us to deploy
clouds. Being able to create virtual system
resources to more fully utilize physical
system resources lays the groundwork for
cloud computing.
Cloud, on the other hand, allows us to
deploy predefined applications or reference
architectures in shared virtual environments. Consumers of commercial cloud
computing can have a third party deploy
applications in a software-as-a-service
(SaaS) model, where the third party provides a predefined virtual environment
with a predefined application that we as
consumers can immediately begin using
or customize and integrate into our enterprise application stack. Or, as is the case
with Amazon Web Services, we can simply
specify a computing environment with the
software we would like to use to build our
own applications in the cloud.
MARCH/APRIL 2011
ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
More than 40
percent of
our members
are already
developing private
cloud computing
capabilities.
For private clouds the idea is the same,
except that we own and manage the physical
environments internally within our organizations. IOUG members are seeing that
providing an internal on-demand computing utility may be more cost effective for
organizations in which business units or
departments historically have spent their
own budget dollars for silos of hardware
and software and the staff to maintain it all.
Why not take a more shared, utility-based
approach to providing computing and application services that has cost advantages
yet at the same time remains within the
control of the enterprise? In private clouds,
organizations can define reference architectures or deliver complete applications and
use virtualization to more quickly deliver
predefined computing environments for
internal use. We can deploy platforms as a
service to create development and testing
environments that are more consistent with
our production environments. We can define
standard reference architectures for transaction processing database servers, for data
warehouses, for middleware, and for application resources.
So what about commercial cloud com-
puting and SaaS? According to our survey
results, IOUG members are not exclusively
choosing private clouds over public cloud
services. Organizations that have an applica-
tion or computing need that is more readily
provided by a commercial public cloud
supplier will still leverage those resources.
But there are still a great number of orga-
nizations with applications and computing
needs that are just not comfortable with
having critical business functions outside
their control. Does this mean every applica-
tion and all data must continue to reside
internally? No. But neither should it all
reside on a public commercial cloud. Private
clouds do not preclude organizations from
going outside to public clouds.
Andy Flower
( andy_flower@ioug.org)
is president of IOUG
and has been an active
volunteer with the
organization since 1998.
In his day job, he is an information management
and business intelligence consultant.
NEXT STEPS
VISIT IOUG
ioug.org
EXPLORE the cloud computing survey and
other IOUG surveys
www.ioug.org/publicationsresearch/
researchwiresurveydata/tabid/90/ default.aspx
AT TEND COLLABORATE 11
collaborate11.ioug.org
