The potential benefits of public clouds are obvious to most IT execs, but so are the pitfalls – outages, security concerns, compliance issues, and questions about performance, management, service-level agreements and billing. At this point, it’s fair to say that most IT execs are wary of entrusting sensitive data or important applications to the public cloud.

How we tested these cloud computing products
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But a technology as hyped as cloud computing can’t be ignored either. IT execs are exploring the public cloud in pilot programs, they’re moving to deploy cloud principles in their own data centers, or they are eyeing an alternative that goes by a variety of names – enterprise cloud, virtual private cloud or managed private cloud.

We’re using the term enterprise cloud to mean an extension of data center resources into the cloud with the same security, audit, and management/administrative components that are best practices within the enterprise. Common use cases would be a company that wanted to add systems resources without a capital outlay during a busy time of the year or for a special, resource-intensive project or application.

In this first-of-its-kind test, we invited cloud vendors to provide us with 20 CPUs that would be used for five instances of Windows 2008 Server and five instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – two CPUs per instance. We also asked for a 40GB internal or SAN/iSCSI disk connection, and 1Mbps of bandwidth from our test site to the cloud provider. And we required a secure VPN connection.

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