“The recent TOSCA initiative has made interoperability for cloud computing closer than ever,” observed Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “However, until players like Amazon and Google join in,” Hillier continued, “it will be difficult for organizations to move from one cloud to the other without risks to their data and infrastructure.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or disagree? – “While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility.”
Andrew Hillier: Although savings and agility are both compelling benefits, it’s usually agility that’s realized first. This isn’t because it is a higher priority, but because it occurs earlier in the cloud adoption process. The push toward standardization and self-service can rapidly increase flexibility and decrease provisioning time, but can actually work against efficiency (much to the surprise of many cloud adopters). The resulting environments are difficult to manage, and many organizations end up with higher spend (for external clouds) or much lower density (internal clouds) than they originally envisioned. Fortunately, by adopting more sophisticated methods of planning and controlling these environments, workload placements and resource allocations can be safely optimized, eliminating over-provisioning once and for all and turning the cloud adoption process into the “win-win” that was originally targeted.

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