Many organizations have been reluctant to embrace services offered over the public cloud, and vendors in turn are starting to offer reserved portions of the cloud to allay concerns about losing control.These virtual, private clouds--or "reserved instances"--are a positive move on the part of the vendors, writes David Linthicum in a post at InfoWorld. 

Amazon Web Services is offering Reserved Database Instances, which gives customers a discounted hourly usage rate for database use in a specific region when they make a one-time payment up front. While it's a fairly high price when you consider the relatively inexpensive cost of commodity servers and open source stacks, Linthicum writes, you avoid the installation, upkeep and maintenance costs.

Linthicum predicts that we will see more "reserve" offerings from cloud computing providers, giving customers a stronger sense of ownership rather than a sense of sharing.

For more:
- see David Linthicum's post at InfoWorld

Related Articles:
Insights into SaaS, cloud-based services
Forrester: Cloud foretells lean times for IT services sector
Microsoft to focus on the cloud
Consultant firm ranks cloud-computing vendors