Over the past five or so years, the phrase “cloud computing” has been tossed around frequently, in various contexts and quite often, meaning different things to different people. If you’re like most enterprises, you’ve already explored what cloud computing means for your organization. Businesses everywhere would love to develop or run applications in a cloud environment that accommodates workload bursts or app testing situations without having to purchase additional server equipment for what could essentially be a very short-lived need. In 2012, cloud computing truly became mainstream – and if you aren’t implementing the cloud in your infrastructure yet, you’re most likely planning for it in 2013.
Alternatively, you might be rethinking your cloud approach. Many organizations have implemented a cloud infrastructure that is impulsive and arbitrary, causing more problems than it solves and costing an IT organization time, money and resources. The development of cloud in the enterprise has proven to have a learning curve – one that will now lead to more and more organizations working to seamlessly combine in-house private clouds with the benefits of public and commercially packaged private cloud services in a hybrid mix.