Over the past few posts I covered a number of key points to consider as you plan to move to the cloud.  These issues are based on our experiences with many public clouds, as well as what we have learned from working with enterprises adopting the cloud.

I hope it’s clear that today’s clouds are powerful resources that can be used to rapidly develop and deploy applications; they provide on-demand resources and true value.  The challenges I outlined in configuration, storage, networking, and management really come into play when you try to integrate the power of the cloud with your existing infrastructure and processes.  These challenges are centered on the fact that the cloud is separate from the data center – a problem that hits home when you want to utilize existing applications and rely on your existing services and infrastructure.

We believe that this hybrid model, where companies can use the cloud as a flexible extension of their data center, is central to the adoption of cloud computing, and efficiently addressing these problems is essential for cloud deployments to succeed.  The technology we have been developing at CloudSwitch is designed to bring this vision to life.  Software from CloudSwitch can now integrate your existing infrastructure with the power of the cloud while preserving your applications, tools and infrastructure investments.

As we look forward to the evolution of cloud computing, I expect the cloud will continue to play a larger, more significant role in enterprise IT.  Cloud providers have shown they can rapidly iterate and improve their offerings in response to customer input and have been drawing from their experiences to develop new and powerful infrastructure and features.  It has been exciting to be part of this evolution so far, and we’re looking forward to the continuing innovation and expansion of cloud computing.

To end this series, I’d like to leave you with the key principles that guide our technology and product development at CloudSwitch:

• Provide end-to-end security between data centers and clouds to protect all data and storage
• Enable existing multi-tier applications to move to the cloud without modification
• Integrate cloud deployments into the existing data center’s management tools and processes
• Eliminate cloud lock-in so you can move between clouds or back to the center as needed

With these principles in place, it becomes possible to resolve or eliminate most of the challenges I’ve outlined in this series, making cloud a much more secure and viable option for the enterprise.

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