Reg readers love Private Cloud (true)

When IT is your day job it is easy to lose sight of why you are doing it. Alright, it’s to pay the bills, fund your next holiday, buy nice stuff and so on. But from the point of view of whoever is paying your salary, the point is to enable and add value to the business. You and your colleagues in the IT department are there to …

[McVirtual]

Nearly there

Again, people seem to be having the virtualisation-as-a-service thought process as opposed to the Cloud conversation where applications are built for the Cloud, and businesses know how to create a business platform to run in the Cloud.

There are a whole new set of metrics to adhere to in the Cloud space

[Anonymous Coward]

Stating the bloody obvious

"You and your colleagues in the IT department are there to provide a service.

I bet the author is a "consultant"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a consultant: Worse!

A salesman for virtualisation and cloud services.

[Magnus_Pym]

I stopped reading at...

"The survey this comes from was mostly about private cloud, which as a fairly new type of advanced solution will have attracted a disproportionately high number of respondents from more progressive (better performing) organisations."

Which I read as

"Here is where I skew the figures towards my personal preferences based on guesswork."

[Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics]

Re: I stopped reading at...

Hey Magnus, now you have me confused.

The whole point of declaring the skew was so I could NOT spin things to my personal view - you can make your own judgement if you don't agree with my interpretation.

Too many surveys (especially in the PR world) are published based on extremely biased samples that are presented as if they were totally representative of the overall universe. We try to be as straight and transparent as we can with these Reg reader studies, hence being up front about the limitations of online surveys. Reg readers are quick to smell a rat, so even if we wanted to, we probably couldn't pull the wool over most people's eyes.

For those who are interested, the trick we use at Freeform Dynamics when anaysing Reg reader surveys is to focus on comparisons that are unlikely to be affected significantly by the self-selection skew. In this case, for example, we have enough people in the top performer group to make a reasonable comparison with others. Whether the ratio of top performers to others is different to the general population (which it almost certainly is in this survey for the reasons stated) is immaterial to the analysis we have performed.

I am always interested in how people read and interpret survey data, though, as all surveys have limitations and no set of results can ever be taken on face value or in isolation.

Anyway, hope that helps, but if you still think I am spinning you a line on this one, let know what you are worried about and I will clarify or correct accordingly.

Cheers

Dale (author of the piece)

PS - The title of the article was not down to me :-)

[Magnus_Pym]

Re: I stopped reading at...

Thanks for responding to criticism in a measured and informative way. Just one question. How are the the 'top performers' selected?

[DanDanDan]

So this cloud thing...

Is the cloud, then, just a cluster running virtualised services? I thought it was more complex than that. There's always to much bulls**t with new technologies, such that no-one understands what's what. Cloud doesn't help out very much in describing what it does and what it doesn't do. It sounds very airy fairy to me. Is there a link that explains what "the cloud" is? Is it the same as HTML5 in that a lot of technologies have been bundled under an inappropriate name for marketing purposes? Or am I missing the point?

Paris - cause she probably likes clouds.

[Magnus_Pym]

Cloudy with chance of bul****t

I thought 'the cloud' alluded to old network diagrams with a cloud to illustrate the Internet. i.e out there somewhere secured, backed up and scaled by world class iron. A private cloud does sound to me like conventional services bundled together in order to cash in on a buzzword.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cloudy with chance of bul****t

You're right except I'd have said ongoing torrential bullshit. Roll on the next buzzword for the marketing arseholes to flog to death.

[Goat Jam]

SO

"Cloud" is just "virtualisation" now.

Meh, whatever.

[Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics]

Re: SO

Hello Goat Jam and other cloud sceptics.

Dale here again (author of the piece you are commenting on).

I have spent the last 3 or 4 years challenging the marketing and PR people on the over-positioning of cloud offerings - feel free to Google my name if you doubt my credentials here :-)

The way I have learned to think about it is that 80-90% of the stuff underpinning all of the cloud related marketing and press coverage is accounted for by familiar ideas and technology, but the 10-20% that's new does allow a lot of that familiar stuff to be used differently.

In the world of outsourcing, this has enabled hosting companies to provide a lot more choice and flexibility, though contrary to the evangelist rhetoric, this doesn't mean that established hosting models are any less relevant, nor that emerging cloud models are always well-thought out (the industry here is still quite immature). .

Similarly, the whole private cloud thing takes the idea of server farms and clusters to a different place, which again introduces a lot more flexibility (this time typically in your own data centre or computer room), but as our latest Reg reader research makes clear, this does not mean the end of mainframes, big Unix boxes, highly optimised specialise clusters, and so on - at least that's what we're hearing back from the masses.

Pulling these threads together, the other interesting finding from the latest reader research is that most people don't regard so called 'public cloud' and 'private cloud' as having much to do with each other. The first is typically viewed as an evolution of hosting, and the second as an evolution of virtualisation. This says to me that most people have not been influenced by the arbitrary use of 'C' word by vendors and pundits as much as some think.

There's loads of stuff on our site (www.freeformdynamics.com) discussing all this, and you'll find lots of articles on cloud from me and others in our team on El Reg (just search for 'Freeform Dynamics'). In the meantime, though, check out the latest reader study report (link embedded in the original article we are commenting on here), which walks through where private cloud may or may not fit into your landscape.

Netting it all out, it is incorrect to say that everything discussed in relation to cloud is new and/or is the answer to everyone's prayers, but it's also misguided to write it all off as being pure hype and spin. There is substance there that can make life in IT a lot easier if it's applied in the right place in the right way - even if it is bloody irritating having to wade through so much marketing guff to get to it :-)

[Dave 62]

I want my 5 minutes back.