The Enterprise Cloud

Preface

Despite the significant momentum and industry buzz about cloud computing, only a fraction of organizations have an enterprise cloud. Most organizations are still planning their cloud transition strategy while incrementally improving traditional IT services and modernizing data centers. Consolidating enterprise datacenters and implementing server virtualization and automation are critical components of any modernization initiative; however, virtualization and automation are only part of the transition to a cloud environment. Although shifting workloads and commodity information technology (IT) services to a third-party hosting provider is not a new trend, cloud computing is a new style of delivering IT that provides on-demand elastic computing capacity through self-service ordering and automated provisioning systems. We have seen our first generation of public cloud providers, enterprise customers building private clouds, and more recently, a shift toward the hybrid cloud. With only a fraction of worldwide organizations already migrating to the cloud, the migration of internal enterprise IT to the cloud will be the most significant transformation within the IT industry.

The shift of traditional on-premises enterprise IT systems (e.g., server farms, storage, networks, and applications) to hosted cloud-based datacenters and providers will dominate the industry over the next 10 years. Cloud-based virtual machines (VMs), storage, and mobile applications are now common and widely ...