Gartner Endorses Private Clouds — But Not How IT Usually Defines It

The message from Gartner analysts was “go private cloud” last week at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2011 conference. However, the same analysts emphasized that building a private cloud is more than just adding virtual machines to physical servers, which is already happening with dizzying speed in the enterprise.

This is refreshing to hear, considering that my consulting life has revolved around explaining the differences between virtualization and cloud computing lately. To be clear, adding virtualization does not make it a cloud. Clouds, including private clouds, don’t require virtualization, but they do need self-provisioning, use-based accounting, multitenancy, and APIs, among other cloud attributes.

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