Enterprise IT bucks fly to the cloud

Again, no real surpise

Public cloud adoption makes sense if you are starting a company from scratch and do want to invest in starting your own cloud. It also makes sense if you don't have any sort of privacy requirements for your clients/customers. If you do have lots of PII data from customers, public clouds are a non-starter. Doesn't matter how much encryption and control you can claim to have, it just takes one security officer from one large client to say no, and no public cloud for you.

My last two employers and current employer are all heavy users of internal clouds (VMware). It works extremely well, and saves a bundle verses traditional servers. Its relatively expensive vs HyperV or oVirt or any of the competitive products, but for the most part the initial investment has been made. We can find engineers that are well versed in it. It works.

When we purchase hardware, compute specifically, we spend less than it costs to purchase the virtualization software. We buy used servers and cheap memory, and all of our apps run very well. While the latest intel chip and 12gb sas sound great, but they make next to no improvement our environments, so why spend the money?

Years ago I asked our Server sales rep how the company was doing now that we don't purchase 100 servers a year, but just a few heavy duty blades. It must not be good for their pocketbook. He said it was bad, but you have to change with the times. Now we don't even purchase new servers from them. No surprise that revenues continue to go down.