We already have a number of customers in the UK building out private clouds (and even more building public clouds), but who’ll be the first to go public with a successful implementation?

Plus interest in building private clouds continues to grow in recent analysis from SearchServerVirtualization.com:

Interest in cloud computing services among our readers was much higher than we anticipated. Out of almost 500 respondents, 155 companies said that a reduction in IT budget made cloud services more attractive, while a third said they were researching the topic and needed to know more. Roughly 30% of respondents said building a private or internal cloud versus tapping into a public cloud like Amazon was more compelling to their organization. About 13% said public cloud services were more compelling, 24% said neither was interesting right now and 31% said they didn’t know. Improving IT efficiency was the biggest driver for building a private cloud infrastructure, but ironically, 45% of readers said that keeping existing operations running prevented them from moving to a private cloud.

With the economy and budget constraints on everyone’s minds, the lack of clarity about the cost of cloud computing came out as the biggest barrier to adoption among our readers. Unknown management and support headaches was the next biggest turnoff, followed closely by concerns about security and reliability. Respondents also worry about getting locked into a cloud provider and how the move to cloud services would affect their staffing.

In regards to the inhibitors above we at Sun UK can definitely help when it comes to understanding costs involved and implications for management and support, as well as approaches to security of the service. Engineering for reliability is something were very proud of at Sun and have significant experience, and part of the answer to staff skills portability is to ensure you adopt open and accessible cloud implementations which engender low costs of entry and low costs of exit.

Get in touch if you’d like to know more: wayne.horkan@sun.com