Enterprise readiness of Cloud ratcheting up
Posted by James Staten
It may just be time for enterprise customers to take a serious look at cloud computing. Major announcements in the past few days from Microsoft and Amazon have certainly signaled that the on-demand Internet computing model has staying power. And with a long recession looming there may be no better time to start getting familiar with something that could dramatically lower infrastructure costs.Amazon, which has been the dominant market leader and pioneer of cloud computing, finally lifted the “beta” tag from the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and delivered an SLA for the service and support for Windows applications. It also announced plans to provide service monitoring, load balancing and automatic scaling services in the future. And Amazon’s even starting taking phone calls and providing premium support for enterprise customers. Nearly all of these capabilities have been available for months from smaller cloud players (especially those coming from an ISP background where such capabilities are commonplace).
Microsoft countered by signalling that cloud computing has such significant staying power that they are willing to bet the “Windows” brand on it. Ray Ozzie’s Windows Azure goes beyond the basic infrastructure and services of EC2 providing Visual Studio.Net developers with the promise of a complete platform for their works. This will put Microsoft in competition with EC2 as well as Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. But Azure is just a technical preview today (aka “beta”).
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