I've been saying for a while now that managed services firms need to be fast tracking their plans for deploying private cloud services to their customers. This concept is not new and goes back to 2009, when MSPs were reluctantly trying to figure out what to do with looming commodity pressures placed on them by software vendors like Google and Microsoft turning once profitable applications like Exchange into almost throw away services.
Naturally, I, and many others, have been urging MSPs to quickly adopt a private cloud strategy to insulate their managed services practices from commodity pressures that might otherwise harm their profitability. Amazon, apparently, has been listening.
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud 2 (EC2) infrastructure is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Historically, MSPs have been reluctant to base their cloud offerings on Amazon if they had to provide any measure of audit visibility into where customer data was residing. This is the essential downside of public cloud computing, especially for more highly regulated customers and MSPs.
Amazon, however, has recently implemented a new program whereby new customers of EC2 will be deployed onto Amazon's "private cloud." Actually, it's a virtual private cloud that contains logical security (meaning the VPC is logically separated from other VPCs). In the near future, all new EC2 customers will be launched using this VPC methodology, moving the Amazon public cloud closer to a private one.
It is stil unclear how private this Amazon cloud really is. Even with this new infrastructure deployment model, many customers who must abide by regulations (or simply value their data and want to keep it close to them) may not get the visibility from Amazon that they could get from a local MSP who has private cloud capabilities and can prove their security through audit trails, like the UCS.
What matters is that public cloud giants like Amazon are clearly listening to the market demand for more private cloud infrastructure. I believe it is time for the MSPs to do the same!
