Peeking Over the Garden Wall

However, I am beginning to see the initial sprouts of growth. They won't arrive this quarter or even next quarter, but by the end of the year, I fully expect to see many vendors bringing the first generation of their products to market.

These offerings will be able to provide the necessary policy management capabilities that will let users keep their data, applications and processes as secure as they need to be.

Once the industry reaches this level of cloud computing maturity, the fun really begins. With the policy management under control, firms will be able to start interacting with third-party service and data providers over the cloud. It will be similar to the current argument for connecting to the major financial intranets: Connect once and you will be connected to the entire ecosystem of third-party providers. By deploying the application or service on the cloud and distributing it in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) manner, it will dramatically reduce costs for vendors by eliminating leased line connections, since it resides on the cloud.

Of course, this will lead to a "walled garden" environment where certain applications and services will exist on certain providers' clouds.

The immediate answer would be for the application providers to develop to each cloud, but that is not realistic. It would be difficult to keep the versions in synch and destroy a good portion of the cost savings that cloud provides.

The answer could be to create a common standard for these clouds, which sounds nice in a Kumbaya sort of way, but is a long and painful process. The actual answer is going to be using middleware that can link firms to the disparate cloud environments.

Do have a different view? Send your thoughts to me at rob.daly@incisivemedia.com