However, from our experience talking with companies every day, we see enterprises are hot on the idea of private clouds, but not necessarily the reality. Specifically, they love the idea of:
(1) Self-service access for users
(2) Automation of manual processes to reduce operations overhead
(3) Ability to scale resources as needed and balance load between different business priorities
(4) Security and maintaining existing IT policies.

Usually, when it comes to actually implementing a private cloud, IT organizations realize:
(1) Building a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure is a major undertaking
(2) Ensuring performance, especially around managing storage, is very hard
(3) There are dramatic up-front capital costs for both hardware and management software
(4) There is no way to easily scale a private cloud on demand, resulting in the need for scheduling software or idle excess capacity

So can you ‘have your cake and eat it too’ with a private cloud (that is get all the benefits, without the risks and administration headaches)? Well, actually you can, it’s called a ‘virtual private cloud’.

Most IT professionals understand that an external cloud offers most of the benefits of a private cloud, but have concerns around security and ensuring IT policies are maintained. Virtual private networking now enables an organization to create their own private cloud using an external cloud service and utilize a secure IPsec tunnel to make this available on their corporate network.

IT administrators can then control policies, such as the allowable subnets a machine in their ‘virtual private cloud’ can utilize and common security controls (such as single-sign on and password policies).

Most organizations want to use private clouds for dynamic workloads, such as application development and test, IT sandboxes, and prototyping, so concerns over data security are typically not an issue (especially as best practice dictates these workloads should not be using production data).

The benefits of the ‘virtual private cloud’ model can be significant:
(1) The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a virtual private cloud is typically 60% lower than an internal implementation
(2) An IT organization can deploy a virtual private cloud in days vs. months for an internal effort
(3) A virtual private cloud can be scaled up or down at will according to business demand – something not easily attainable with an internal private cloud.

We have many customers that have proven out the virtual private cloud model. One customer, a major enterprise company, deployed their Skytap virtual private cloud within a week and now uses it for SAP release testing. Another customer, Bakbone, has been using Skytap as a VPC solution since last year. They’ve seen substantial cost savings and have scaled their Skytap cloud as demand has increased.

We’re strong advocates of the virtual private cloud model and believe it’s a lower risk and more cost effective approach than building an internal private cloud. It’s usually far better to try adopting a virtual private cloud first before making a large investment (that may fail). So, if you’re planning a private cloud strategy, feel free to contact one of our cloud specialists and we’ll get you started with a Skytap virtual private cloud so you can evaluate the benefits yourself.

Read the full press release here.

• Support for advanced, multi-tier network topologies
• Ability for users to deploy virtual data centers with multiple networks using Skytap’s self-service Web user interface
• Comprehensive network security and policy management using virtual routers

Click on this 3 minute video for an overview of Skytap’s network automation features.

“… the harsh economic climate will actually accelerate the growth prospects for the software as a service (SaaS) model as vendors position offerings as right-sized, zero-CAPEX alternatives to on-premise applications. Buyers will opt for easy-to-use subscription services which meter current use, not future capacity, and vendors and partners will look for new products and recurring revenue streams.”

This statement applies equally well to all cloud services, which convert expensive Cap-Ex investments into variable Op-Ex expenses and are low risk to adopt.

We’re definitely seeing many prospective customers looking for ways to offset cash outlays and a willingness to try new delivery models. We’re also confident that over time many of these customers will see cloud services as a compelling long-term alternative to in-house solutions.

Skytap is used for dynamic workloads such as application development and test, IT prototyping, virtual training, ERP migration, IT team collaboration and maps to three of the top scenarios above. If you’re mapping out your cloud adoption strategy, feel free to contact one of our cloud specialists and hopefully we can help.

The buzz around cloud computing reached fever pitch this year, culminating in Gartner placing cloud computing at the peak of its hype cycle in July. We saw controversy around the Open Cloud Manifesto, the federal government getting into cloud computing with apps.gov, and almost every IT vendor trying to put a cloud spin on their marketing message (whether their offerings are cloud-like or not!).

However, hype aside, there is a widespread recognition that the operational and economic model of cloud computing will transform IT over the next few years. As we close 2009, which represented a year of uncertainty, reduced budgets and cautious recovery for most in the IT industry, I believe we are at the tipping point for widespread adoption of cloud services in 2010. With that background, here are Skytap’s five cloud computing predictions for the upcoming year:

1. Hype Replaced by Pragmatic Adoption

Many enterprises see the potential of the cloud computing model, but have been trying to understand the proven use cases before taking the plunge. Fortunately, we’ve seen many early adopters lead the way this year and there is an emerging consensus around the top scenarios which take advantage of the scalable, multi-tenant and on-demand nature of cloud computing. These scenarios include: (1) Development and Test, (2) IT Protoyping and Proof-of-Concepts (POCs), (3) Scalable Web Hosting, (4) Email, (5) Collaboration, (6) Grid Computing/Scientific Calculations and (7) Virtual Training. In 2010 we’ll see these scenarios become well-defined blueprints for enterprise adoption of cloud services.

2. Moving Beyond ‘VMs On Demand’ to Cloud Solutions

We now see a slew of companies that are offering ‘Virtual Machines on Demand’ for a few cents an hour. However, this still requires organizations to do much of the work to make these ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ offerings available to their employees. Over the next year, we’ll see vendors who offer cloud services as complete solutions win over basic infrastructure offerings. For instance, solutions that help integrate internal and external clouds, provide enterprise single sign-on and security, offer billing and chargeback mechanisms, enable business processes and workflow, and automate complex tasks will prove more valuable to enterprise customers than hosted virtual machines.

3. Emergence of Best Practices

If 2009 was the year of defining key cloud computing scenarios, 2010 will be the year of best practices. As more and more IT practitioners gain experience with cloud services, this knowledge will disseminate in the industry and best practices around security, networking, ‘hybrid clouds’, application architecture and IT policies will become widespread. This will also include best practices around negotiating service level agreements (SLAs) (both internal and external) and contracts.

4. Cloud Consolidation and Brokerage

As more and more enterprises adopt cloud solutions, we’ll see vendors differentiate on support and services, enterprise integration and pricing models, performance and SLAs. In tandem with vendors differentiating their offerings, we’ll start to see some consolidation in the industry as major vendors look to build out a portfolio of offerings that can be leveraged through their existing channels and sales organizations. Finally, it’s likely that some early cloud service brokers will gain traction to shield enterprises from negotiating with multiple vendors around SLAs, security credentials and pricing.

5. The Rise of Cloud Consulting

Given the high interest in cloud computing and organizations looking for impartial advice in the face of a confusing vendor landscape, we’ll see consulting practices built around the design and implementation of the major cloud scenarios. Initially, this will be driven by boutique consulting shops, but by the end of 2010 we’ll see many of the major consulting players offer consulting practices and advice for adopting a cloud-based approach to IT.

As we move into “The Year of Realism,” keep your eyes on these trends as they will no doubt shape the next phase of cloud computing.

For full details of the announcement, click here.

Amazon EC2 is clearly a pioneer in ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ cloud computing. But many enterprises are asking if raw ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’, such as EC2, is enough for their dynamic IT workloads.

Working with many Fortune 1000 companies, we’ve discovered the top ten enterprise requirements that any credible solution for dynamic IT workloads must meet. Here’s the top ten list you should use when evaluating a cloud provider:

1. Ability to Run Existing Enterprise Applications Unchanged in the Cloud
An external cloud must support all enterprise applications and operating environments that run on the x86 platform, including ERP systems, client-server applications and infrastructure servers, such as Windows Domain Controllers. In addition, there needs to be robust network virtualization and enterprise-grade IPsec VPN capabilities to enable seamless connectivity to in-house systems, such as mainframes and Web services.

2. Self-Service Web Portal for Functional Users
Enterprises have a wide range of users that require access to the cloud. To ensure cost savings and agility associated with ‘self-service IT,’ a business or functional user must be able to provision and access cloud resources without assistance from technical support. Command-line tools and a basic Web interface designed for technical users isn’t enough to satisfy this requirement.

3. Virtual Data Center Control and Configurability
In the same way enterprises run a wide range of applications and platforms, they also need to support a wide range of infrastructure configurations in a virtual data center (VDC). To ensure that a cloud environment can mirror an internal environment (esp. important for dev/test), a cloud platform must offer full configurability of servers and networking including the ability to dynamically scale disks, set CPU cores and memory per virtual machine, configure NICs and MAC addresses, and specify network subnet addresses, host IP addresses, host names and more.

4. Virtual Data Center Install and ‘Fast’ Snapshots
To reduce manual set-up and tear-down work to create IT environments, our customers require the capability of suspending an entire VDC and taking a snapshot (including memory state of the machines). Snapshots are especially useful when diagnosing software bugs, as an entire application stack can be suspended at the point of failure for a developer to debug at a later time. It is also useful to save a ‘golden image’ of a virtual data center for deployment at a later date.  In all these cases, our customers expect rapid response time and ease of use, typically operations to be performed in seconds rather than minutes.

5. Import and Export VMware Images
The vast majority of enterprises run VMware for their virtualization platform and expect their external cloud provider to run on the same platform. We expect Hyper-V will also gain traction in the next couple of years. We believe the ability to import and export native virtual machine images is important to enable interoperability between environments and avoid vendor lock-in. We have spent tremendous time ensuring we deliver on that promise. Enterprise customers want to know “how easy is it to get out” more than “how easy is it to get in.”

6. Support for Existing Software Licenses
It’s essential for cloud providers to support existing software licenses as most enterprises have already paid for licensing agreements to cover enterprise-wide usage. For instance, Microsoft’s MSDN licenses cover the development and test of Microsoft products by specified individuals in an organization. Many external clouds, including EC2, force users to ‘double pay’ if they already own MSDN licenses.

7. Role-Based User Access Control (UAC)
Users within an enterprise often have different permission levels. Our customers require us to provide the ability to set fine-grain permissions depending on the role of the user to comply with corporate policies. Furthermore, enterprises often require a ‘single sign-on’ capability to utilize the same LDAP or Active Directory servers for user management

8. Policy Management, Cost Control and Charge-Back
To keep costs down and ensure compliance, our customers asked for the ability to auto suspend machines when not in use. As a result, we only charge when machines are in use. They also required us to provide quota management at an individual and organization level to cap usage, provide charge-back reporting and enforce corporate IT policies in the cloud.  A model of charging for any provisioned machine with no granular policy management is not likely to be suitable for most enterprises.

9. Team Collaboration and Workflow
To facilitate and agile approach to IT delivery, clouds must allow users to share desktops and virtual data centers, assets and documents, much in the same way users collaborate using products like WebEx and Microsoft SharePoint.

10. Enterprise-Class Support and Training
Enterprises should expect a dedicated account team and technical specialists, as well as a thorough on-boarding process to ensure the cloud is successfully adopted across the organization. Premium phone support is a good start, but this isn’t enough.

At Skytap, we are seeing cloud computing gain more traction in the enterprise. We’ve seen these critical enterprise requirements take precedence to a low cost cookie cutter infrastructure as a service approach. As we said earlier, Amazon EC2 deserves huge credit for blazing the innovation trail here.  However, we feel most ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ offerings are fast becoming an undifferentiated utility without addressing enterprise requirements.

That said, if the majority of IaaS vendors improve their platform fidelity and performance, and enterprise customers are satisfied it can meet their requirements, we expect the adoption rate of these services to increase significantly. With those changes, we also expect solutions that include brokerage capabilities to rapidly gain in popularity.

(For more details on these capabilities, download the white paper, A Buyer’s Guide to Choosing a Cloud Service Provider).

For full details of the announcement, click here.