For our inaugural blog we could have simply introduced ourselves, our company and described why our opinion is worth reading. Instead we’re going to jump in and tackle the private cloud topic that is getting much attention in the media and blogosphere these days.

There is no debating the incredible growth cloud computing is seeing right now. The adoption of cloud services, in the form of SaaS applications like E-mail and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or more to the point, infrastructure services such as virtual servers and storage, has been so great in the last two years that every major player in the software market is scrambling to define and roll-out their cloud strategy.

At Radiant, we’ve seen this rise first hand as we provide a variety of cloud services to our customers. These services range from enterprise class Hosted Exchange E-mail to enterprise grade private clouds and virtual servers. As a cloud provider we’re always promoting the well known benefits of outsourced cloud infrastructure:

Lower cost: no servers to buy (lower capital costs) and no physical servers to manage (lower labor costs).
Flexibility: Ramp your consumption up and down as your business requires instead of staffing and investing in equipment for peak loads.
Agility: Quite possibly the most important benefit of using cloud services is the time to value concept. If you need more service today, you buy it today, not 4 to 6 months in advance. Let the service provider take that capital risk.

Given these arguments and the incredible success Amazon has shown leading the way with their EC2 virtual server and S3 storage services, why aren’t all companies scrambling to move their infrastructure to Amazon or other public cloud providers?

The reality is that there are two primary models of consuming these cloud services being worked out today:

Public cloud services: These are services such as those Amazon and Google provide. These provide all the benefits of the cloud but come with little or no guaranteed service levels. They also provide very little transparency as to where your data is stored. These services have been extremely well adopted by individual developers and internal development groups requiring computing resources for non mission critical applications.

Private Clouds: Extremely large enterprises are looking at the other end of this spectrum and have made an early decision that they are big enough and have enough computing need that they can build their own internal private clouds. Infrastructure vendors like EMC see a big opportunity to sell expensive hardware and software that will run these private clouds and are helping to push the private cloud concept. Here is a very good review of a recent cloud panel featuring IT executives from some large financial institutions talking about adopting the cloud.

What if you’re a mid-sized or larger company that wants to take advantage of cloud computing benefits? You need service level guarantees, someone to pick up the phone when you need help, and an understanding of where your customer data is being stored. What are your options if you don’t have the scale to build your own private cloud? If you do have the scale, would you really want to?

This is the gap most businesses find themselves in today. This is the expertise we have at Radiant. Our blog, among other topics relevant to our areas of expertise, will focus on the rapidly moving cloud industry as it pertains to these types of businesses and how they can begin to adopt cloud services.

Our first few posts will touch on what we believe these types of companies need from cloud computing providers and what questions they should be asking when looking to adopt cloud services.

We would like this blog to become a forum to discuss cloud adoption in the enterprise. If you’re currently using cloud services, we’d like to hear from you. What’s working, what isn’t working. What are your biggest issues adopting cloud services?