AND yet men are advised - Never be possessive.

As Bruce Jay Friedman quotes – “If a female friend lets on that she is going out with another man, be kind and understanding. If she says she would like to go out with the Dallas Cowboys, including the coaching staff, the same rule applies.”

Are you kidding?

For a man, it’s not that easy. Specially if the female in question is your daughter.

For a business man – exactly! It’s far tougher. How can one let one’s real assets - all the information, all processes, all functions, all that your people do – be scooped out and plated somewhere outside, on someone else’s table!
Or on a cloud!

It doesn’t come as a surprise then to hear the recent blitzkrieg about private clouds.
With so many backpacks –like security jitters and sweat about control – the hare called public cloud is strapped tight and heavy. But then it’s no more a world where tortoises overtake.

Or do they?

No hobnobbing in Clouds

Indian companies surveyed in a study by IDC (A Key Strategy to Business Growth in Asia Pacific”, sponsored by information infrastructure solutions provider EMC Corp) tilt heavily towards the tortoise.

An almost bear hug for private cloud met the eyes, with extremely low responses for public cloud until 2013. If the figure-watch is anything to go by, currently, only four per cent of those surveyed in India adopted private cloud but 18 per cent were planning on implementing private cloud within next 12 months. Another 23 per cent of organizations indicated plans to implement private cloud within the next 24 months.

At the face of it, the numbers are not jarring. The tide may be turning strongly.

Manoj Chugh, President of EMC India & SAARC and the Director of Global Accounts, Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ), for EMC Corporation is very confident about the surge.

“We see Cloud as the big wave for sure. It will be all pervasive. Our bets would be on hybrid clouds. That’s the way to go. Within India, it would first be private clouds, and then hybrids.”

The ‘why’ interestingly does not need much explaining.

Forget the complexity and torrent of jargons that Cloud has pelted at the industry, but even for a layman it is not very hard to guess why private clouds could turn out to be the trailblazers in comparison to public and hybrid counterparts.

No body would want to throw away one’s stuff to a dockyard where everyone else (including your most formidable competitors) is juxtaposed. Where the regulatory cops (read compliance requirements) can walk in anytime and rip open any box even before you come to know of it.

You wouldn’t want to take the risk of renting cars when you can own one.  Not at least if you can leverage the new technology safely, and put the magic carpet called Cloud in your private box, in your own premises.

That’s what Private cloud essentially is. Better defined as an internal cloud or corporate cloud, or a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall.

It’s all about control, and more…

Security is naturally tops the pecking order when it comes to ascending a Cloud. Constant anxiety over one’s critical information pieces lying somewhere else has sicced enterprises into fiddling with Cloud but without throwing caution to the winds.

Many organizations will move to private clouds for security reasons, as R “Ray” Wang is a Principal Analyst & CEO of research firm, Constellation Research told me in a discussion about Clouds.

He predicts commoditized business processes to shift to the BPO model. BPO – SaaS will become the norm as organizations shed lower level processes and focus on custom dev in PaaS and extending SaaS and Cloud suites.

But there’s more to the whole enchilada of going ‘private’. Most private clouds add real value in terms of virtualized data centers for more dynamic infrastructure optimization.

As Dennis Drogseth, Vice President, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc explains -  New capabilities for more dynamic service provisioning, including so-called “on-demand”—which really should be described as “dynamic service responsiveness as appropriate to customer requirements” is also a clear benefit. 

Now whether all the demands of cloud are met there, is less relevant than that it ‘is’ beneficial.

As an avid blogger on Cloud, Kent Langley writes-  the necessary trade-offs regarding security and privacy inherent in public cloud computing will likely cause private clouds will flourish. 

Companies will find this economically desirable, managerially pragmatic, cost effective, and very disruptive to their IT Departments.

As to all the noise around private clouds, David Shacochis, Vice President, Global Public Sector, Savvis, Inc. pegs it to two sources. It’s IT-intensive verticals and major IT vendors.

Verticals that consider IT infrastructure to be core to what they do (i.e., algorithmic financial trading, Web-scale services) are going to architect their own in-house IT in a highly-automated model because that’s the only way they can be successful.

This is a prognosis by someone who takes care of product life cycle at this cloud computing player. From where David stands, (he is responsible for revenue growth, product alignment and the adoption of cloud computing within this strategic vertical market), he sees major IT vendors have latched onto this trend through the introduction of cloud “in-a-box” offerings that patch together compute, storage, software, network and security resources into one investment – with the promise of equivalent efficiency.

But there’s a catch.

The challenge that many enterprises face is that they don’t have the budget flexibility to make large capital expenditures (capex) on a frequent basis, and many of these cloud “in-a-box” purchases require significant capex investment both in terms of hardware and software integration.

“Many of the enterprises we speak with are considering these private cloud investments, but want to do so with a vision of how they can seamlessly tie them to reliable public cloud options to handle rapid requirements or ephemeral workloads.” David spells out.