The public cloud is picking up momentum, but many large enterprises are still hesitant about jumping aboard the public “as-a-service” bandwagon. Dan Lamorena, a director for Symantec’s storage and availability management group, explained,

“You may not see the mass adoption of the cloud [in large enterprises] for five, ten or even fifteen years. Many organizations won’t change until it’s time to refresh servers and other critical infrastructure. It just won’t make sense before then.”

Public cloud adoption has increased, but many enterprise class businesses are already heavily invested in their existing infrastructure and have a long list of concerns about transitioning to a public cloud-based architecture. However, a growing number see the private cloud as a happy medium. Large companies are investing in virtualization to consolidate their infrastructure and drive down overhead; this can also be a stepping stone towards a true cloud environment.

A virtualized environment is not equal to a private cloud. Enterprises have to tackle several additional areas to deliver internal cloud services: on-demand access, fast provisioning and visibility. These are all key components for cloud computing and they aren’t exactly easy to address. Just being able to track usage and scaling up and down can be immensely complex without automation and the right solutions.

Large businesses are starting just beginning to move forward with many innovations that smaller more agile organizations embraced long ago (long in Internet time) and large vendors are definitely ready to address the new influx of demand. Oracle recently rolled out the second version of its Exalogic software, which introduces new virtualization components to the company’s “elastic cloud” appliance. Companies like Rackspace, VMware and HP are racing to launch new cloud-based products and services to attract revenue from this new pool of customers.