Cisco: Regulatory Pressure to Drive Private Cloud

Regulatory pressure is likely to keep private cloud alive and growing within the overall cloud computing market, according to Rob Lloyd, president of Development and Sales at Cisco Systems (CSCO).

ZDNet recently noted that Lloyd said “private cloud is not going away.” Lloyd was quoted as speaking to a group of Australian media about Intercloud, the company’s global cloud network that it hopes will play a significant role in the cloud space.

But Lloyd also seemed to go against common belief that as enterprises become more confident and comfortable with cloud services, they will increasingly turn to the public cloud. Lloyd seems to believe the opposite—that as regulatory issues continue to put pressure on enterprises and cloud services providers that enterprises will focus more and more on implementing private cloud solutions.

“We have heard for a year or two about the construct of the market, and how it has been trying to respond to the complexity that has emerged in networking … [but] command line interface network units that’s expected to lead to the agility and flexibility that customers are looking for today isn’t going to be the answer,” Lloyd was quoted as saying in the article.

Of course, Cisco is also pushing the importance of the future interconnection between the enterprise network and the cloud. Lloyd and other Cisco executives aren’t suggesting public cloud is going to lose out entirely to private cloud, but at least in the enterprise, Cisco seems convinced that the private cloud is going to be the big winner.

If that’s true, Cisco may want to tie itself much more strongly into the growing OpenStack community. Its competitors sure are. And OpenStack seems to be the clear frontrunner when it comes to the platforms that lie beneath the surface of private clouds. Cisco is no stranger to OpenStack, but it has not been as vocal of a proponent of the open source cloud platform as several of its competitors and partners in the cloud space.