Is Your Cloud Open by Design, and Open for Business?

While the official attendance is not in yet for the OpenStack Design Summit Paris, the final figure will likely be near 5,000 with representatives from 60 nations.

During his keynote speech, OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Colliersaid attendance was very impressive growth for an open source software community that is only four years old. What fuels all this interest? Is it just a group of software programmers getting their geek on? Whats driving all the rapid growth of engagement and deployment of OpenStack-based cloud solutions? Whats the business value of open cloud technologies?

When an enterprise CIO initially embarks on starting to move an organizations computing processes to the cloud, he or she is likely to begin with a focus on cost reduction. Early messages about the value of Cloud were about the ability to cut costs. However, many early cloud solutions were extensions of proprietary, vendor-specific solutions with closed architectures. At the same time, there was a lot of debate about whether a Public vs. Private cloud was the best way to begin developing your cloud solution approach. I addressed these issues in a prior blog post herein Wired.

Increasingly, the CIO and senior IT leaders have come to understand that its more important to consider the near-term business implications of their cloud strategy, even as they continue to evolve their existing cloud architecture to drive greater value from their current IT infrastructure. They need to understand the strategic implications of selecting their cloud vendor/provider(s), so they can balance the short- and long-term requirements and obtain greater flexibility without locking their organization into a technology straitjacket.

What are the elements of truly open cloud architecture? It has to be a multi-faceted approach to ensure that you dont simply check the open box and miss the point. The fundamental elements of an open cloud architecture are:

By ensuring that your cloud strategy incorporates most of all three of these elements of an open cloud platform, you canbe sure that you are not building a dead-end cloudinfrastructure.

OK, that was a focus on the technology, but what are the net benefits to your organizations bottom line?

Open cloud technologies are not simply important for the CIO and their IT departments. Open cloud technologies provide tangible value to their business. Some of the key areas of value are:

To learn more, visit ibm.com/cloud or join the conversation at #ibmcloud.

Jeff Borek is Worldwide Program Director for Cloud Computing at IBM. You can follow him @jeffborek

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Is Your Cloud Open by Design, and Open for Business?