I’ve long been of the mind that whilst we’re seeing a lot of new businesses being able to fully cloudify their operations, mostly because they have the luxury of designing their processes around these cloud services, established organisations will more than likely never achieve full cloud integration. Whether this is because of data sovereignty issues, lack of trust in the services themselves or simply fear of changing over doesn’t really matter as it’s up to the cloud providers to offer solutions that will ease their customer’s transition onto the cloud platform. From my perspective it seems clear that the best way to approach this is by offering hybrid cloud solutions, ones that can leverage their current investment in infrastructure whilst giving them the flexibility of cloud services. Up until recently there weren’t many companies looking at this approach but that has changed significantly in the past few months.
However there’s been one major player in the cloud game that’s been strangely absent in the hybrid cloud space. I am, of course, referring to Microsoft as whilst they have extensive public cloud offerings in the form of their hosted services as well as Azure they haven’t really been able to offer anything past their usual Hyper-V plus System Centre suite of products. Curiously though Microsoft, and many others it seems, have been running with the definition of a private cloud being just that: highly virtualized environment with dynamic resourcing. I’ll be honest I don’t share that definition at all as realistically that’s just Infrastructure as a Service, a critical part of any cloud service but not a cloud service in its own.
They are however attempting to make inroads to the private cloud area with their latest announcement called the Service Management Portal. When I first read about this it was touted as Microsoft opening the doors to service providers to host their own little Azure cloud but its in fact nothing like that at all. Indeed it just seems to be an extension of their current Software as a Service offerings which is really nothing that couldn’t be achieved before with the current tools available. System Centre Configuration Manager 2012 appears to make this process a heck of a lot easier mind you but with it only being 3 months after its RTM release I can’t say that it’d be in production use at scale anywhere bar Microsoft at this current point in time.
It’s quite possible that they’re trying a different approach to this idea after their ill-failed attempt at trying to get Azure clouds up elsewhere via the Azure Appliance initiative. The problem with that solution was the scale required as the only provider I know of that actually offers the Azure services is Fujitsu and try as you might you won’t be able to sign up for that service without engaging directly with them. That’s incredibly counter-intuitive to the way the cloud should work and so it isn’t surprising that Microsoft has struggled to make any sort of in roads using that strategy.
Microsoft really has a big opportunity here to use their captive market of organisations that are heavily invested in their product as leverage in a private/hybrid cloud strategy. First they’d need to make the Azure platform available as a Server Role on Windows Server 2012. This would then allow the servers to become part of the private computing cloud which could have applications deployed on them. Microsoft could then make their core applications (Exchange, SharePoint, etc.) available as Azure applications, nullifying the need for administrators to do rigorous architecture work in order to deploy the applications. The private cloud can then be leveraged by the developers in order to build the required applications which could, if required, burst out into the public cloud for additional resources. If Microsoft is serious about bringing the cloud to their large customers they’ll have to outgrow the silly notion that SCCM + Hyper-V merits the cloud tag as realistically it’s anything but.
I understand that no one is really doing this sort of thing currently (HP’s cloud gets close, but I’ve yet to hear about anyone who wasn’t a pilot customer seriously look at it) but Microsoft is the kind of company that has the right combination of established infrastructure in organisations, cloud services and technically savy consumer base to make such a solution viable. Until they offer some deployable form of Azure to their end users any product they offer as a private cloud solution will be that only in name. Making Azure deployable though could be a huge boon to their business and could very well form a sort of reformation of the way they do computing.
[…] the better part of a year now, just under a different name. Indeed when it was released I actually took Microsoft to task over it (remember this was before Windows Server 2012′s release) lamenting the seemingly half-assed […]