The cloud promises lowering IT operating costs, faster access to applications and customers and reduced data center costs. But it also means sacrificing some security, or at least the illusion or security, by moving core applications and data pools off premise.
But as Datamation found, most enterprises companies are using public cloud services such as Amazon’s EC2 more than realized and will likely come to depend on them more in the very near future.
The study found that 19 percent of these website transactions included at least one element hosted by Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service, and most of the websites using these cloud elements were based in the United States.
Is the enterprise ready for cloud computing? It’s an issue that’s constantly debated at industry conferences and the focus of articles in InternetNews.com and other IT-oriented websites.
While cloud vendors tout the basic value proposition of moving IT infrastructure like applications and storage to the cloud,, CIOs and IT managers worry about security issues and not having the same level of control that traditional on-premises data centers provide.
For these reasons and others, so-called private clouds that operate behind the firewall have been more readily adopted by enterprise customers. The debate these days is how ready for enterprise prime time are public cloud services from companies like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).
