Cloud Trends: The Evolution of Vertically Targeted Public Clouds

Clouds today are not what clouds will be tomorrow. As the technology of clouds evolve, clouds will become more tailored  to the needs of specific consumer groups, specific professional groups and specific industries and markets.

Vertical marketing of cloud technology will bring about vertical branding of clouds. Google Home is one indicator of this trend. Google Home is a cloud platform that is geared for the home, the home consumer.  Saleforce.com , with the promotion of its Health Cloud, is another example of a vertical cloud marketing trend. Other cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure, IBM, HP  and Rackspace will more than likely join in this trend, if they already have not.

Today though, companies, professionals, and consumers for the most part must still sort through an ocean of IT jargon to determine what cloud provider actually can fill their specific cloud computing, service and software needs.  Those who are knew to cloud technology, and are not IT professionals, are forced to learn the meaning of unfamiliar terms such as  Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and so on and so on.

These terms baffle many and are not conducive to making sales to companies that simply want to know what the cloud means to their professional lives and business organizations.  A vertical marketing approach that uses terms that are familiar to specific types of professionals and businesses, and avoids terms that are IT professional centric  may well be a better way to educate target markets about the cloud and generate market  interest.  IT centric words, still, have their place. After all its IT departments and CIOs that actually make cloud buying decisions. As well, it is the IT staff that evaluates a cloud provider based on network metrics such as computer time, hardware allocation capability, security and optimization capabilities.

Cloud vertical marketing will open the way to a more highly competitive market. For example, there is little doubt that  a biotechnology company would prefer to go to a cloud provider that focuses on biotechnology business and scientific needs than  just an everyday generic cloud provider  The ideal biotechnology cloud provider would specialize in high-powered genetic SaaS,  databases specific to the needs of biotechnology companies, hardware configurations that are optimized for intensive genome calculations and even have PaaS specifically made for the development of biotech software. All of which would help reduce not only operating costs of biotechnology companies but reduce the cost of market entry.

The list of vertical clouds is as endless as the number of different business markets. For example, automotive clouds, agricultural clouds, transportation clouds, logistics clouds, integrated circuit clouds to name just a few possibilities. . This means that there is  plenty of work for cloud providers to do. And it means that the ones that do this vertical work will end up with major market shares in specific and lucrative vertical cloud markets.

Choosing the Right Clouds for Your Business; Public, Private or Hybrid?

Choosing the right cloud configuration for your business is critical for lowering IT costs, managing company growth, and protecting against calamities. Companies that are overly dependent on their own private cloud face rising IT costs and vulnerability to IT business calamities. On the other hand, companies that are overly dependent on public clouds, place their IT future in the hands of strangers. Companies that make judicious use of a hybrid cloud architecture, minimize the risks and maximize the gains that can be obtained from both private and public clouds.

Private business clouds, swaths of  interconnected servers and software and computers,  were what many companies of the new millennia were built on. IT staffs in the early 2000s, built up on-site networks which connected the companies' computers together. They installed software on the servers for the employees to share, backed up data on the network to hard drives and tape drives, and developed software that glued the company' IT operations together and kept it running. As the company's IT needs grew, so did the complexity and problems of running the in-house network. Computer crashes, data thefts, and breakdowns on infrastructure software as well as the time to maintain that software all became bigger issues as well as IT costs. What once were small networks, grew into large networks that constantly needed hardware and software upgrades, which constantly needed larger IT budgets, new computers and new software, and higher levels of professional staff  to maintain.

Public clouds today present a solution to the problems, costs and complexities of on-site private clouds. With a public cloud, a company no longer needs to have an on-site network and associated IT staff to support the companies IT network. With a public cloud, all hardware (hardware as a service, HAAS) and software (software as a service, SAAS) that a company needs, in theory, can be accessed over the Internet. All the company needs are terminals to access the software and hardware at the off-site public cloud.

For example, with a subscription to  Microsoft's public cloud,   all of a companies employees, can have complete access to Microsoft;s vast data center and Microsoft's vast number of software products. With additional configurations a company can utilize Microsoft's Azure cloud as a supercomputer that will run massively complex and data intensive calculations that they could never do, in a practical manner, with an on-site private cloud. Furthermore, all of a company's files and data can be stored in Microsoft's cloud with relatively little risk that the data will be lost or broken into. Finally, all this can be done without a costly IT staff and without the need to consider the costs of on-site hardware and software upgrades.

The theory is great when it comes to the public cloud. Lower IT costs, access to the latest software instantly, worldwide company connectivity, and no more worries about company-wide hardware and software upgrades. In practice though, companies don't always want all their data and all their software on the cloud. There are also security issues, and laws and regulations when considering a public cloud. Furthermore, companies may have already made a substantial investment in their own private cloud. As well, its often not practical for employees to access software programs on the cloud over the Internet. It is often just much more convenient and efficient to keep the software on their own personal computer then access it over the cloud.

For those in this situation, a hybrid cloud is the solution. A hybrid cloud consists of an interconnected public cloud and private cloud. In a hybrid cloud architecture, a company uses its internal data center and IT staff to manage part of the companies IT needs and a public cloud, or for that matter several public clouds, for a different set of IT needs. Often though, a company can opt for a cloud architecture that interconnects a private cloud with a public cloud. In these cases, data files may be backed up in real time to a public cloud, offsetting the need for the IT staff to back-up their private cloud. Persistent data backup schemes make this task very efficient. A persistent data back-up scheme scheme doesn't back up all the data, but only the data that has changed. For example, in a persistent data scheme, only data files that had changed since the last backup are saved.

As time matches on, the idea of private clouds and even hybrid clouds may drift into just the concept of a public cloud. Startups for example, may just not have the motivation for establishing an in-house network complete with servers, routers and gateways and an expensive IT staff. If a public cloud provides the horsepower of a million computers, the ability to interconnect tens of thousands of employees, and data backup in a more and more reliable and trusted manner all without the need of costly IT staff, the risks and costs of a private cloud and even a hybrid cloud outweigh the risks and costs of a public cloud.