Mar 25 2009 1:44PM GMT

Amazon EC2, cloud computing and the enterprise

Tom Nolle Profile: Tom Nolle

Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) is gaining some traction as the framework for software vendors to offer software-as-a-service (SaaS). This is no surprise given that the value of cloud computing is most easily demonstrated for large-scale applications that could be highly variable in their requirements.

Amazon is also more of a “true cloud,” in that it offers greater flexibility and elasticity and imposes no major restrictions on applications (an x86 image is required). SaaS is also likely an early market for cloud computing because by nature it is incremental to current IT plans.

For cloud computing to be successful, though, it will have to move outside of these simple sideline and overflow missions and take on more mainstream applications. We believe that this can happen only by having enterprises adopt private cloud architectures for their own data centers, which would facilitate integration of public cloud resources.