Cloud Decisions

• Evolution rather than replacement.
The private cloud can evolve from existing virtualized infrastructure, enabling the transition to cloud computing without a complete and disruptive infrastructure overhaul.
• Security and compliance.
With a private cloud, data is retained within the enterprise, behind the corporate firewall, where IT can exercise full control over security, privacy, and regulatory compliance. With public clouds, enterprise data is housed in external data centers—and may move from location to location, without IT’s knowledge or consent. The dynamic movement of data in a public cloud may also present compliance challenges with local regulations.
• Service level agreements (SLAs).
Keeping applications in-house can help IT continue to meet SLAs deining performance, availability, and other critical business requirements. Some external providers may not be able to furnish the same level of service.
• Cost.
A large enterprise private cloud can provide economies of scale, resulting in total cost of ownership (TCO) that is competitive with or lower than public clouds. Intel IT, for example, found that services can be hosted internally at equal or lower TCO than hosting them externally.
• Building expertise.
Architecting a private cloud enables IT organizations to develop a knowledge base that can be applied to public clouds in the future. When creating the private cloud, IT will need to develop detailed application and data inventories, and gain key skills such as managing cloud SLAs. This experience will help build effective relationships with public cloud providers, enabling IT organizations to assess whether they meet enterprise requirements

(excerpt from http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/cio-agenda-paper-vmware.pdf)

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