Private clouds gain traction

Private clouds--where companies run their own virtualized services--are becoming popular among IT leaders who are looking to add services at a lower cost.

Right now, the idea is falling short on some essential issues, especially manageability. However, researchers are predicting that IT shops will spend more than half their budgets on private clouds by 2012.

Alan Boehme, senior vice president and head of IT strategy at ING Financial Services in San Francisco, tells Computerworld.com that a private cloud differs from the old way of thinking about systems architecture. "It's not just servers, storage or networks; it's every component," he argues.

While the idea is still finding its way, Gartner is finding that both public and private clouds are growing dramatically, totaling over $3 billion this year, up from $2.5 billion in 2008.

The bottom line is that the cloud is here to stay. The question is, in what ways will it be fully embraced?

For more on private cloud computing:
- see this Computerworld.com article

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