Back in 2008, the term “cloud computing” was barely a glint in the eye of most technology companies. Perhaps they used SalesForce.com and Gmail, but tossing around the “cloud” terminology wasn’t really de rigueur.
Now it’s hard to imagine tech discussions without some reference to it at least once in conversation. Seems like it’s everywhere – or at least the terminology is.
In 2009, Esri hitched its geo-wagon to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our primary cloud provider. But the general consumer audience was much more familiar with shopping experiences through Amazon.com rather than cloud hosted services off of AWS. Fast forward less than three years, and things certainly have changed. AWS has established itself as separate and different from Amazon.com, with a brand synonymous with “cloud” as a globally-known public cloud infrastructure service provider. And in 2010, Esri announced the availability of ArcGIS Online, initially supported by AWS infrastructure under-the-hood, to bring the ubiquity of a public cloud platform to the geospatial community.
At the same time that public clouds were moving into mainstream business, a parallel current of a cloud trend was emerging: Private Clouds. Initially, there was (and still is) a lot of back-and-forthing on the definition of “private cloud”, and arguments around the private cloud notion as simply a re-branding of an organization’s existing data center – infrastructure hosted on-premises behind the firewall. But with the advent of cloud computing, organizations are now exposed to some of the technologies that enable the core characteristics and benefits of cloud computing: The idea of a self-service portal for their customers or staff; and the virtualization of servers – that is, the ability to create multiple “virtual machines” from one physical server – affording increased optimization of underutilized infrastructure, ratcheting up server optimization to 75% or more, from an average of 25%.
In fact, for many businesses and agencies, the private cloud may be the only choice when attempting to leverage [at least some of] the benefits of the cloud computing “skyscape”. Hosting data and applications off-premises in a cloud provider’s data center, potentially out of the country or in a seemingly unknown location, might be legally prohibited, or verboten by organization requirements and politics. This growing interest in leveraging the private cloud has not gone unnoticed by Esri and we are moving quickly to provide solutions for this demand.
Portal for ArcGIS allows any organization to stand-up their own customized ArcGIS Online, to create their unique geographic content system, on-premises within privately-owned data centers, or managed by Esri, behind configured firewalls, to have more control over security concerns or to meet regulated restrictions.
Available in Q2 2012, ArcGIS Online for organizations carves out a private community cloud for any company, business, group, organization or agency. Although hosted in public off-premises infrastructure, the services and data are specific, secure, and isolated to only the members of the organizational account, but with access to public services, hybridizing the public and private cloud, seamlessly.
Most recently, Esri paired up with VCE — a coalition of EMC, Cisco, and VMware – to successfully test and certifyArcGIS on their private cloud infrastructure appliance. Vblock, as it is known, provides the storage, network switches, virtualization layer, and compute capacity that many organizations will find attractive as a bundled private cloud platform, in a nearly plug-and-play capacity.
Esri is dedicating significant investment, research and development into public and private cloud offerings and providers – and we will continue to do so, going forward. It is without question that cloud computing has the potential to be a disrupting trend upsetting traditional technology models, and yet simultaneously demonstrating the potential for a promising boon. And what about you? Where do you and your organization stand “in the cloud”? Private, Public, Hybrid or ‘None of the Above’?!
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