Since few weeks the members of the virtualization.info Vanguards community are enjoying a new discussion forum.
As the feature is pretty new not all of our 1,800 members are using it. Nonetheless some interesting threads are coming out.
One of the is specially interesting and starts this way: Do you think the current financial crisis will push CEO/CFO/CIO to reduce the IT costs by adopting Cloud Computing services? (Amazon EC2, Salesforce, etc.)
The answers arrived so far from prominent virtualization architects and engineers bring in several perspectives, all worthwhile of mention. A summary:
- …I think you will start to see more and more companies using the cloud for DR purposes as well to where the CapEx is reduced dramatically and the monthly OpEx is reduced as well where companies will spend approx. $60 per VM per month…
- …I don’t see the recent financial turmoil leading to an increased adoption rate for cloud computing services. In this market I think executives are focused on saving money and cutting costs, but an en masse migration to a cloud service provider from a current standing data center is not a cheap solution. The solution requires capital up front, manhours to put together a contract, train internal resources, architect a solution few are familiar with and properly vet the solution. Some may dabble with it as a development alternative but considering a large contingent of data centers have at least some core services running in a Windows environment, and Windows-based cloud-hosted virtual machines are just now becoming available, I think we’re years away from seeing this really take off…
- …I don’t think companies would look at the cost savings yet so much as the reliability. I don’t think Amazon et al. have proven themselves with a long enough or good enough track record that companies would turn over their core systems to them…
- …I really see cloud computing as an updated and automated way of outsourcing. In my experience outsourcing does usually have a small increase in activity during poor economic climates, outsourcing is more about shifting responsibility and allowing the CEO/CIO/COO to shift capital costs around and also pretend to have more certainty within their IT operations. Unfortunately, its also a lot about blame assignment for when a service failure occurs. Its easy for the CXO to blame the outsourcer and say its not their fault…
As you can see the discussion is very interesting but it’s clear enough that cloud computing is not here (as a mainstream technology). Virtualization is, so the original question may become: Can the financial crisis drive companies to virtualization?