It’s traditionally tax day, so we have to remind you that this year the deadline has been extended until midnight on Monday, April 18th. One more weekend for those procrastinators out there! Thankfully the only online tax system downtime we’ve found so far is in the U.K. – and it was planned maintenance. Think there is no connection between taxes and cloud computing? Think again. Digital product and electronic tax questions may soon become a new topic du jour. Even lawyers are starting to question the cloud.
Waiting for a virtualized hybrid cloud? You might have to wait a bit longer. David Linthicum’s latest article says that server virtualization management in a hybrid cloud environment just isn’t there yet. The idea is compelling he says, and who wouldn’t want it? Imagine a world where you “can load balance between your private and public clouds at the VM level, moving virtual machines between on-premise and public cloud servers, running them where they will be most effective and efficient. You would have sets of virtualized servers that exist in your data center, with the ability to move virtual machines dynamically between your data center and a public cloud provider.” Sounds perfect, right? Not for cloud vendors, according to Linthicum, who says vendors would need to provide a mechanism that allows virtual machines to be executed outside of their technology, which would impact license revenue.
The conundrum is enterprises want to leverage this technology via VM-level dynamic migration between private and public clouds. Providing a dynamic mechanism to move virtual machines around public and private server instances removes a lot of barriers around cloud computing, such as lock-in, security, governance, cost, and performance.
It may seem surprising since cloud is everywhere (perhaps overtaking Twitter as most talked about in the media), but businesses are still struggling to determine how they are going to integrate cloud computing services into their IT operations. Businesses are playing catchup to the cloud, according to a recent article in the New York Times which points out that analysts say the marketing of the cloud is way ahead of real offerings by suppliers and its adoption by business customers. The times are changing though, especially with the government all atwitter about the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy laid out by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. It’s people who really set the pace for change and adoption, and some think it will take years for the cloud to fully integrate into older, legacy systems, particularly when you also factor in concerns of security and reliability. It doesn’t matter for some though. The Amazon cloud has been able to grow in scale and efficiency year over year, coupled with the fact that competitors are few and far between. Really, the market is driven by SaaS, pushing forward the need for more PaaS and IaaS. It may take years for the cloud to take over every business, but the foundation has been set and everyone has hit the ground running. As for those businesses who have been at the forefront of the cloud computing revolution, Marc Benoiff from Salesforce.com says it best, “What’s being called the cloud now is the future of enterprise software, but when I started in 1999 no one believed that. Sometimes you do have to wait them out.”