Deliver Cloud Benefits Inside Your Walls

While the excitement about cloud computing centers on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other public infrastructure-as-a-service products, many enterprise infrastructure and operations professionals are taking this concept in-house and building their own internal clouds. These pools of virtual machines can be built upon either virtual server or high-performance computing (HPC) grid foundations and can be operated according to the specific security and process requirements of the business. But to deliver the fundamentally better economic value of cloud architectures within your walls, these clouds require a dynamic platform (or automated workload management) and developer self-service interfaces. There's a growing list of vendors eager to help you deploy an internal cloud, but be sure you understand that these solutions are more building blocks than complete solutions and must be customized to your specific needs.