BANGALORE, INDIA: For many enterprises, moving to a cloud services model has become a holy grail in terms of their future IT vision.

After all, what’s not to like? Send all of the complexity of managing your infrastructure to someone else, and enable instant spin-up of services. At the same time, the organization can significantly lower the cost of their IT services. For example, IBM iNotes Live starts pricing at $3 per user, per month. It’s a good bet that not all IT organizations can effectively run their internal electronic communication platforms for that low a cost.

When the term ‘cloud’ comes up most people envision Amazon Web Services, Google, or Salesforce.com. These vendors are certainly the icons of the cloud vision, and are attempting to become a one-stop shop for all of an enterprise’s IT needs.

But these vendors are really focused on public cloud services. They drive cost down and scale up by trying to support thousands, perhaps millions of businesses on their platforms. They centralize all of their services in a few data centers around the world, and try to deliver global services – at acceptable performance - from these locations.

This is the purest vision of the cloud. It completely abstracts away all the complexity of dealing with physical IT infrastructure. Due to thin-provisioning and virtualization, these vendors can present a seemingly limitless data centre infrastructure at a low monthly cost. These visions, however, are not without their problems.

According to a recent research paper out of UC Berkeley, entitled Above the Clouds, public cloud adoption will be hindered by a number of factors: availability, vendor lock-in, security, data transfer bottlenecks (bandwidth limitations), performance unpredictability (latency).

Public cloud vendors will likely overcome the last two by adopting WAN optimization infrastructure, but the other three barriers (combined with one more issue described below) have pushed some enterprises to take a different tact with the cloud: private cloud services.

 The idea behind private cloud services is to take the fundamental business and delivery model for public vendors and scale it down to delivering the computing capacity for an individual enterprise. For enterprises that have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees, they may also reach the tipping point where they can cost effectively provide the type of instant, seemingly endless computing and storage capacity that public vendors have.

By consolidating storage and applications, virtualizing infrastructure, and then providing acceleration to branch offices and mobile workers, businesses are beginning to create private cloud services. In essence, businesses are taking their physical data centers and changing the way they manage the services that run out of that data centre.