By Rodney Rogers, CEO, Virtustream

Virtustream, Inc. is a cloud innovator offering enterprise-class cloud solutions for enterprises, governments and service providers. The company has raised a total of $50.4 million funding from Columbia Capital, Intel Capital,Noro-Moseley Partners, Telecommunications Development Fund, and QuestMark Partners.


Cloud computing has now moved from early experimentation to prime time. Many enterprises are now moving beyond virtualization and early cloud trials and are deploying enterprise critical applications and data into the cloud. Almost all enterprises are now taking their first steps into the cloud and putting together their cloud plans. The cloud is also opening up new business models as well: cloud enables both information and IT to become dynamic, scalable and on-demand. Medium and small businesses can now access world-class IT without needing to build it personally.
Cloud economics are very compelling: customers achieved 60 percent lower TCO by adding virtualization to IT, cloud enables another 20-30 percent lower TCO beyond virtualization. What's also notable – and exciting – is that major enterprises are moving complex IT and mission-critical applications into the cloud.

It's a sure sign that cloud computing has become mainstream when major businesses are comfortable with the security and capabilities of the cloud.

Enterprises are starting to explore hybrid clouds. The ability to connect two clouds together and use them as if they were one enables powerful business options: backup, disaster recovery, and cloud migration, cloud-bursting. Looking forward, expect to see the combination of private, virtual private, public and community clouds - all interconnected and sharing information dynamically. Hybrid and federation cloud models will emerge as a key trend over the next few years, simplified by new software solutions to control complex hardware and hybrid deployments.