The decision to build a private cloud, use a public offering or go with a combination of both comes down to a number of factors, says Rick Wright, the head of KPMG’s global cloud enablement initiative. Companies must consider business criticality of the applications they want to move to the cloud, regulatory issues, required service levels, usage patterns for the workloads and how integrated the applications must be with other functions within the enterprise, he says.
Businesses required to comply with regulations and availability demands of highly critical applications will deploy internal private clouds or specialty outsourced solutions that will adequately address the security requirements of the organization. This will enable the company’s to benefit from the upfront savings as well as the convenience and the flexibility to shift workloads and usage spikes when required.

On the other end of the spectrum will be bootstrapped startups that need to bring a service to market without incurring upfront capital expenditures, or general non mission critical functions of businesses that have no regulatory hurdles or are working with data that doesn’t have to be integrated with other parts of the organization. These functions generally move to public clouds available through major brands like Amazon, Salesforce, Hitachi, IBM and their long list of reseller partners that operate under their own individual brands and play a significant role in the buzz and popularity of public clouds.
Given the concrete facts available to date, no matter how businesses decide to proceed, organizations that maintain control over their content and processes, including outsourced vendors, will shield themselves and their intellectual property from the bubble that is certain to burst as the public cloud market reaches maturity in the future.

Carl E. Hewitt is Associate Professor Emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.   Here he provides a brief overview on Cloud Computing.

According to Ron Conway, the iconic Silicon Valley investor in early-stage technology startups, Cloud Computing changes the way we’ll think about computing, transform the way we use mobile and other devices – and create a huge number of opportunities for new companies. Obviously, we here at Carrot agree completely. You can read more about Ron on thedeal.com.