A lot of vendors are announcing “cloud washed” solutions that is just adding to the hype in this nascent technology. It also adds to customer cynicism on what really makes is a cloud solution? I see an increasing number of ISV’s say we have a cloud-enabled solution. Sometimes it is just press release that they have “announced” a cloud solution in partnership with a hosting provider. Under the covers, this press release is just the capability to host their application in the data center of the hosting company. This is the kind of solution that customers have been doing for years and is fueling the skepticism of cloud computing among customers.

There are a number of characteristics that make up a cloud solution that you can get from the NIST site. However, when your providers hype up agility, flexibility, security and other cloud computing benefits, ask them one question: what is your multi-tenancy capability? Multi tenancy can vary from the single instance/single tenant model to multiple tenants sharing storage, application and servers.

Business agility and cost savings can truly be gained from multi-tenancy. It is not easy to re-write applications to be multi-tenant capable. Cloud washing existing applications is not helping customers understand the value of cloud computing. Read between the lines when you are pitched a solution and it should cause your “hype-meter” to start frantically beeping if they are not multi-tenant capable!