Private cloud investment will outdo public, says Gartner

More investment will be put into private cloud services than external cloud providers, Gartner claimed today.

In a report, the analyst firm said that although it sees a future for the external cloud, private cloud offerings will work as the main stepping stone and encourage the most investment till 2012.

Phil Dawson, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement: "For now, private cloud computing will not just be a viable term, it will be a significant strategic investment for most large organisations."

He added: "We predict that through 2012, more than 75 per cent of organisation's use of cloud computing will be devoted to very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by start-ups with little to no IT infrastructure."

Looking further into the future, Dawson predicts that organisations will work with a combination of both rather than one or the other.

"Larger organisations will continue to have an IT organisation that manages and deploys IT resources internally. Some of these will be "private clouds", but not all," he continued.

"IT departments will also take on IT service sourcing responsibility determining when to leverage external providers, when to deploy internally, and when to leverage both for specific services," Dawson added.

Two factors must be examined before investing in private cloud rather than public, according to the report.

Firstly, private services are deployed for approved members only, making access for the general public or businesses difficult. Secondly, they can be built on top of a public cloud infrastructure or in a hybrid model.

The report concluded that "although some IT services are destined for the cloud computing delivery, others are destined for more integration and intimacy with the business."