It’s exciting – and engaging – to finally see cloud computing and storage gaining strong and lasting market adoption.  And not to be always looking for the next IT trend, but I’ve felt for the last 12+ months that it’s been time for additional IT services to start making their way to the cloud…or at least delivered via a cloud-based format.

Well it looks like my wait is coming to an end, given announcements by my [new] company, Virtela, as well as other vendors making announcements over recent weeks, and even the recent Riverbed announcement.  There appear to be two primary architectural approaches to offering cloud IT services – either integrated as single service offerings (e.g. WAN optimization tied to existing cloud compute or storage resource pools like Amazon EC2 (see #2 on diagram below), or as independent cloud-based service offerings – either single service or more holistic multi-service IT cloud platforms (see #3 on diagram below).
Read more