Private Clouds: Standards For Interoperability Could Spur Adoption

Private cloud infrastructure is now a hot topic with many IT organizations.   The benefits cloud computing include agility, flexibility and cost savings, but for many, worries about security, loss of control, compliance and other legal issues when data is moved to the public cloud have kept many organizations away.  Private cloud computing is an alternative that many companies, especially large companies, are now considering.

In an eWeek article, Matthew Richards, senior director of Product Marketing, Cloud Computing, at CA Technologies said that “There’s a lot of interest in building private clouds on the part of large enterprises today. It’s becoming more and more important for IT departments to think of themselves as an internal service provider and focus on the services that are being delivered to business people.”

The larger the cloud structure and the larger the number of participants, the more efficiencies of scale that can be achieved.  A private cloud is unlikely to ever be as cost efficient as what can be achieved with a large public cloud offering like Amazon or Salesforce.com.  Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, for example, has warned of problems with the public cloud.  “Beware of the false cloud.  The false cloud is not efficient,” he said.

In order to facilitate the building of and management of private cloud infrastructure, standards are beginning to be established.   One such standard, called OVF (Open Virtualization Format) would allow the interoperability of different virtual environments.  Consider a private cloud with the capability of being able to “cloudburst” in periods of heavy demand to use the resources of a public cloud.  But interoperability only comes when a large number of vendors move to support a standard like OVF.

OVF is a standard that came about in 2007 and is managed by the Desktop Management Task Force and it has now become an ANSI standard.   The adoption of OVF by cloud vendors will bring users more flexibility and help them to avoid lock-in into any one particular vendor.  OVF would allow users to move their data easily between cloud vendors.  But not all vendors are excited about implementing it.  Amazon, for one, is still on the sidelines when it comes to OVF.