Toward public cloud

We are now living in the second decade of the 21st century and having data/services online is not an advantage anymore, but not having it is a disavantage. We used to deploy servers in data centers to make sure our customers have permanent access to our services or to give the sensation that we were always online.

Our internal IT infrastructure was changing step by step and the recurrent question used to be: should we based everything around Microsoft to minimise the products' compatibility or should we take the best of every product and support their interaction ourselves?
We were living with the philosophy of IT perimeters delimited by security devices even if users were spending their time collaborating with others, sharing their documents by emails located somewhere. Somewhere connected.

Today, everything looks different due to our understanding of news trends and the near future:

• the soon to be soaring energy price,
• the unavoidable trend of collaboration pushed by social networks and the behaviour of generation Y,
• the old distribution system, like emails, are dying and people communicate on their social tool board,
• the distributed models of data storage related to the end user's needs.
  

Consequently,

• while the cost of hardware is constantly droping, optimising the infrastructure operational cost is a mandatory survival concern,
• while de-perimeterisation has not been oriented, at least the value of data is now understood, identity and access control are coming next,
• while the data storage reliability is transparently managed by multi nodes systems, traditional ACID databases have new competitors.
  

What is the trend regarding system management?

• Computing resources never get used in small companies : 10-20%,
• It's only by using huge data centres that the costs will be minimised,
• Using optimisation by mechanisms like auctioning will be really efficient.
  

Resource optimisation:

• Private cloud (belonging to one company) cannot be a scalable solution and enterprise data will move to the public one. It does not mean the enterprise's data is public but the infrastructures are shared among many companies.

Localisation:

• Cloud regionalisation could be one solution: OK, I may be biased due to my current professional security activity. But feeling that at least a part of my data is not far from home could be less a subject of fear.
  
• Also, this is the only solution for software, hardware vendors and IT staff to stay alive, to justify their value.

Now, another huge issue is the way to manage data: so let's talk next about the Nosql movement.

Sources :
Perspectives: Perspectives - Using a Market Economy
Informationweek: Private Clouds Are A Fix, Not The Future
Elasticvapor: ElasticVapor :Life in the Cloud: Amazon EC2's Greatest Threat is Cloud Regionalization