Amazon Customers Can Now Get A Placebo Cloud

That would be the new Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) by Amazon.

I am a big proponent of the public cloud but I am a bigger proponent of giving what the customers really want. Amazon had resisted offering a private cloud but they finally gave in and offered a private cloud or at least this is what they want the customers to believe. The bloggers are already questioning whether VPC is a true private cloud. Regardless of the arguments whether the VPC is really a “virtual” private cloud or a “virtually" private cloud, I believe, this placebo cloud is likely to help the customers overcome the cloud computing adoption barriers:

Security: The placebo cloud would alleviate the perceived risk of adopting the cloud computing. The perceived risk is based on the customers’ past experiences. The customers believe that anything that they can connect using VPN must be safe even if they are tunneling into a set of shared resources. The customers will get an environment what they believe is safe and secure to deploy and consume the applications.

Ownership: The VPC does not let the customers own the computing but still provides a sense of ownership. If Amazon’s marketing engine does a good job the customers would be less wary about the lack of ownership.

Virtualization: The customers are not necessarily clear about the real differences between virtualization and the cloud and they necessarily don’t care as long as their business goals are realized. The VPC would allow the customers to work with the existing technology stack that they already understand such as VPN and network-virtualization. The VPC would also empower the partners to help the customers build the bridge from their on-premise systems to the cloud to create a hybrid virtualization environment that spans across various resources.

Even if I personally favor the public cloud I do want to see the customers buy into the cloud computing and later make a decision whether they should move to the public cloud to leverage the cloud in its true sense.

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