One of the reasons it’s so difficult to satisfactorily define cloud computing is that people have many different needs and expectations from a cloud platform. To start a conversation about cloud — especially one that seeks to evaluate the relative merits of competing cloud platforms — without first identifying what needs are being met is to invite misunderstanding and confusion. So before I come to my analysis of Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform and the hidden danger lurking there for many ISVs looking to embark on a SaaS strategy, I’m going to segment cloud computing into several important but separate categories.
First and foremost, we need to be clear whether we’re talking about cloud as a service or cloud as an infrastructure asset. I often find myself halfway through a conversation about cloud computing, in which I’ve made the natural assumption that we’re talking about delivery of cloud computing as-a-service by a third-party operator, when it suddenly dawns on me that the other person has been talking about buying software and hardware in order to implement their own cloud infrastructure.
There’s a huge cognitive gulf between these two perspectives. In my view, most enterprises that invest in their own cloud computing projects are on a Fool’s Cloud mission. Unless you intend to set up as a cloud provider in your own right, it’s unlikely in the long term to be a good use of your funds. But I have to recognize that my point of view currently represents a tiny minority compared to mainstream opinion. Most enterprises are convinced the best way to take advantage of cloud computing is to implement it themselves. Many will find they achieve significant short-term savings from doing so, simply because moving to a virtualized data center architecture with automated provisioning is a much more cost-effective means of rapidly provisioning new servers than what they used to do. The newly launched Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) at the US Department of Defense is a good, topical example. But it’s not a variety of cloud computing I want to discuss here — in fact, in many ways, I don’t define it as cloud computing at all because it’s behind the enterprise firewall rather than immersed in the public cloud…
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