Medium-sized businesses are doing well with their adoption of cloud computing while enterprises are lagging behind, according to an EMC executive.
In an interview with IT PRO, Martin Snellgrove, global competency lead for EMC Consulting, said the private cloud was the way to encourage larger businesses to get on board with cloud computing as a whole.
"Medium businesses have made good progress, however larger organisations are looking for the help to broker the transition," he added.
"It is about scale and the fact they are held back in terms of ownership. Large organisations are pretty complex and each department is only accountable for their own infrastructure. So you transfer 20 to 30 per cent and then hit barriers."
Mukesh Sharma, director of VMware Alliance in Europe for EMC, agreed with his colleague and believed that the private cloud is what will help fill the gap.
"Different types of organisations have different views, some customers are aggressive with their plans but many aren't," he said. "I see this private cloud offering we have as a stepping stone."
He added: "Create a pilot of non-legacy to try it out, then build a business case comparing before and after."
This approach fits with predictions made by Gartner earlier this week that more investment would be made in the private cloud than public until 2012 as businesses were untrusting of the full public offering.
Phil Dawson, research vice president at Gartner, warned that while private clouds may well be the stepping stone to using cloud computing, "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."
