Private Clouds Set to Dominate Horizon

A recent article on Microscope highlighted the Gartner opinion that the focus on Private Clouds is set to remain until 2012, with enterprises still reluctant to invest in the various public clould offerings available such as Amazon, Go Grid etc.

This is hardly surprising due to the fact that these services are relatively new and there still remains a lot of scepticism, founded or unfounded, over their security, stability and compliance.

But does this spell doom for anyone in the hosted cloud space?  Not really.  What I see happening is a move to 'hosted private clouds' - those companies who have been happy to outsource their hosting into colo facilities or onto dedicated servers will still want to leverage some of the benefits of cloud - flexible billing, resource on tap etc and whilst they might not want to send their applications into the ether, they will work with providers who can offer virtualised solutions within their datacentres.  The advantage of this is they know where their data will be hosted, even down to which physical machines & disks it will be on, which rack it is in etc.

Most virtualisation vendors are now working on some sort of standardisation which will; assist in migration to public clouds at a later date, eg VMware's vCloud API, so investment in 'hosted private clouds' makes a great stepping stone towards partial or full public cloud adoption when cloud becomes accepted by the mainstream.