Reducing operational costs and accelerating the delivery of new business functions are ever-present themes of IT organizations. Over the past three years, many enterprises and governments have been evaluating how the cloud can address these familiar themes. A number of them have used public clouds or a service provider’s virtual private cloud to perform “proof of concepts” or to run development and test environments. This provides a risk-free way of determining if the cloud delivery model will provide the desired benefits and if their organization is ready to embrace it.

In recent months, I have met a number of clients that are now ready to move production applications to the cloud—mission critical applications that require high-availability, multi-site redundancy and very specific performance requirements, such as high I/O throughput for storage. These requirements cannot be met by a public cloud offering. Therefore, a private cloud infrastructure is required. 

In a number of RPFs that we have been involved with, clients have been very prescriptive on the type of server, network and storage equipment they want. They want a “purpose” built private cloud environment designed to their specifications. During post-response meetings, however, a large number of these organizations realized that what they really want is a service that meets their performance requirements and, in the end, they shouldn’t really care about how the service provider achieves it.  During the RFP process, clients have told us that they want to let go of the technology and focus on purchasing outcomes—and this has been a difficult mindshift for them.

Clients are increasingly asking solution providers to forget about their detailed technical specifications and instead provide a “standard” cloud offering, so that they can benefit from the solution provider’s experience. This change in approach/attitude benefits clients by enabling service providers to leverage proven cloud architectures and service support processes and, thereby, reduce the client’s cost while delivering higher quality service.

Whether it’s computing capacity or a business application, the cloud is all about purchasing (or renting) outcomes versus detailing a specific technical solution. This gives the service provider flexibility in managing fluctuations in demand and passing the savings on to the client.