Forbes: Cloning For The Cloud

13 July, 2010

How you can use the cloud right away, without starting from scratch.

Most people in IT are overwhelmed with possibilities for using the cloud. Infrastructure-as-a-Service provides raw materials such as virtual machines, storage and databases for computing. Platform-as-a-Service provides an environment for a specific type of application programming. Software-as-a-Service allows you to get going with a cloud-based application in an instant.

Most of the time, however, when these offers come at the typical IT practitioner, there is an implicit responsibility of starting from scratch...to use the cloud you must clean up the current mess you are in, learn some new skills and then actually move to the cloud.

But what about moving parts of existing IT infrastructure to the cloud? Is this possible? Is it advisable? Can you clone just a bit of your mess and move it to the cloud?

This idea first occurred to me after a conversation with Kevin Epstein of CloudShare, a product that could be used for this type of cloud cloning...

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