A business unit of SunGard Data Systems in Europe has rolled out a series of “private cloud” services that promotes “pay as you go” economics.
The “cloud solutions” of SunGard Availability Services is promising its customers “the flexibility to subscribe to the compute power and storage” that they need, purchased from a network of data centers that SunGard operates in the United Kingdom.
Customers, in effect, will share the infrastructure and its costs. The customers will not have to buy any hardware, but will get 24/7 service, including regular updates to software and data protection services.
SunGard’s combination of network, security, load-balancing, computing power and managed storage of data will compete with baskets of services from such players as Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud, Google, and Microsoft.
But SunGard may also be competing against its own customers’ moves to create their own ‘private clouds.”
“I believe that enterprises will spend more money building private cloud computing services over the next three years than buying services from cloud computing providers. But those investments will also make them better cloud computing customers in the future,’’ contends Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman.
Advances in virtualization and distributed computing in effect have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers who can meet the needs of their "customers" within the corporation.
In effect, a company’s own network of data centers can be managed as a private cloud.
This article can also be found at SecuritiesIndustry.com.
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld is the editor-in-chief of Securities Technology Monitor.
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