The Seven Deadly Sins of Cloud Computing

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Click through for the seven deadly sins of cloud computing, as identified by rPath.

Too many IT organizations are taking a narrow approach to cloud computing that not only threatens to lock them into one particular platform, but also serves to constrain the development of the IT organization itself.

Those are just two of the major conclusions of a list of "Seven Deadly Sins of Cloud Computing" that rPath, a provider of IT automation tools, created to help IT organizations better comprehend the real potential of cloud computing.

According to rPath CTO Brett Adam, to many, IT organizations are essentially taking an approach to cloud computing that does little more than “put some lipstick on virtualization.” They are not really developing an elastic cloud that allows applications to not only dynamically scale up or scale down, or one that includes a bevy of self-service capabilities based on automated provisioning of IT resources.

Obviously, a lot of IT organizations are under an intense amount of pressure to get a cloud computing strategy in place. But in response to that pressure, many of them are simply deploying virtualization management tools on top of a particular virtual machine environment and calling that a cloud, which is also known as “cloudwashing” an existing IT infrastructure. The biggest danger associated with that tactical approach is that it can easily lock an IT organization into a particular virtual machine platform that may prove costly to deploy at scale later on.

At the same time, not having a real cloud computing strategy hinders the development of the IT organization, says Adam, because of an over-reliance on manual processes that were originally developed for what is rapidly becoming a bygone era of enterprise computing.

Ultimately, Adam says cloud computing will transform enterprise IT, but right now many IT organizations are simply trying to buy some time to create isolated clouds within their enterprise that ultimately do little to improve the total cost of delivering IT services.