Private Cloud Computing Deployments Advance Rapidly

It is not at all surprising that enterprises are wary of public clouds - they have never been otherwise with previous large-scale inter-networked technologies... Let's get real - IT business is about racing for the short-term gain over competitors. It is a primitive biological urge, when a species finds a comfortable environment, to eradicate all other species in that environment. The back-lash, however, is going to sting like a genetically modified killer-bee from the depths of hell itself - the compound total cost of ownership, the inevitable fragmentation (and lack of motivation to produce open standards through collaboration), will breed a new kind of information war, putting the power of technology back into the hands of the custodians of cyber-space to try to patch the problem in retrospect... as per! All that hoo-ha aside, however, surely vendors can put more effort into the software running on these platforms? Surely vendors need to step up and and invest in the human capital that _can_ solve these issues (e.g. computer scientists, mathematicians, etc.); rather than hiring software cowboys and trying to bulldoze clients with politically-oriented pitches? Take a step back, zoom out, lease a smart-card-based security mechanism from toshiba/hitachi/whoever, for example, and continue in the spirit of the Internet by _co-existing_ with it. If not, then the private cloud could become the ruin of the Internet (as it is discarded as a 'failure', or for lack of commercial interest). Maybe a different industrial model could solve the problem: Instead of outsourcing along the value chain, why not also identify an 'integrity' chain (driven by risk management), and outsource in that direction too? I am worried about market fragmentation, and the not-so-graceful degradation of the Internet due to neglect. The Internet is a cloud, and therefore we stand a chance of losing it (as a public space) by it being deprecated by hte largest bodies that currently sustain it. Too extreme? Let me know what you think about wanting freedom and taking the responsibility to make things 'secure enough'. I think we're just scared because we have no real experience in the reality of public clouds. In-house, private, obscure, and home-grown systems, however, have been around since before, but not after, the brith of the Internet. Development cost of using private clouds is surely much higher than public ones? This is for reasons that I could only explain in volumes of books more dense that Knuth's Art of Programming!