Public versus Private Cloud is a NOOP Cloud Conversation!

If you’re about to have a cloud conversation with someone (a customer, an internal colleague), the worst thing you can do is dichotomize the conversation into public versus private cloud. And here’s why.

Most folks looking to adopt cloud computing are looking to do so from a transformative perspective. For example, if your organization can’t compete because your organization is too slow to respond to new opportunities or changing market conditions, and when traced back to the root cause, it’s because:

• IT still takes 6 weeks to stand-up a server, let alone get your app services up and running for the new business opportunity within a months
• The sales team need the IT app up and running before they can add new customer or pricing information
• The supply team need the IT folks and the sales folks to be done before they can add the new orders to the ERP system with the new SKU’s and pricing data for the new customers

Then tackling just the cloud conversation in terms of public or private is really not addressing the key issue, which is, how does the organization as a whole become an on-demand, always-on, 24/7 business.

When you ask this question, the answer to Private versus Public cloud becomes, both. You need a strategy that spans internal and external, because ensuring you have an on-demand internal IT capability, that is self-service and supple, that connects to a flexible, on-demand business organization, that can extend past the firewall, is how to deal with rapidly changing customer, market and internal business needs.

So make sure you cover all aspects of becoming an always-on organization, including how to leverage cloud computing internally and externally, and how it can serve as a transformative function against other business units, or you’re just getting a small part of all the goodness cloud can offer.