According to research by the management consulting firm McKinsey, cloud computing is over-hyped and may not be a good path for large corporations.
Their analysis shows that cloud computing may be as much twice as expensive per unit of computing than traditional large corporate data centers are.
However the report does point out that for smaller firms - which in McKinsey's world are companies with less than $500 million in revenue - cloud computing is a good idea. Key quote from the study presentation:
"Clouds already make sense for many small and medium-sized businesses, but technical, operational and financial hurdles will need to be overcome before clouds will be used extensively by large public and private enterprises."
As the presentation points out, cloud computing and cloud services provide small businesses with powerful IT capabilities at lower costs than traditional methods.
ZD Net has more on this.
This is a lame report that really doesn't have a realistic scenario they are evaluating. For a large enterprise they likely already have their technical operations in a data center and are access the data via an internet connection... be it VPN, TS or something else. Effectively they are already living in the cloud. Additionally using the Amazon infrastructure when you are already invested in a data center makes no sense to even suggest.
In addition the Amazon infrastructure in only one of many clouds in the sky, and we all know clouds come in many shapes.
Posted by: Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, MCSE 2003 | April 24, 2009 at 06:38 AM
I agree with Byron Patrick, there are several approaches to deploying cloud services, from a growing variety of service providers that meet the IT and networking needs or both large and small companies.
Gartner, Inc. has a different perspective than McKinsey. Only time will tell who had the most accurate assessment. More detail on Gartner's view is available here http://bit.ly/VyptG
Posted by: David, Business Technology Roundtable | May 06, 2009 at 02:38 PM