Much of the general interest so far in cloud computing has focused on public clouds, from vendors like Amazon. But Gartner sees enterprises shying away from the public option — at least at first. Datamation digs into the story.
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Public cloud services aren’t the best bet for enterprises looking to replace or supplement their data centers, according to research firm Gartner. Through 2012, Gartner forecasts IT organizations will spend more money on private cloud computing investments than on offerings from public cloud providers.
Startups and other organizations have jumped on fast-growing public cloud offerings from Amazon and others.
There is also great interest on the enterprise side for cloud services from the likes of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and others. Gartner defines public cloud computing as a style of computing in which scalable and “elastic” IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. By contrast, it defines private cloud computing as a system in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to internal customers using Internet technologies.
“The hype of cloud computing is that existing IT architectures and processes can be simply replaced by the cloud,” Tom Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “The reality of the future IT organization, however, is somewhat a combination. Larger enterprises will continue to have an IT organization that manages and deploys IT resources internally, some of which will be ‘private clouds.'”