I’m sure you’ve heard, as I have, the debate over whether cloud computing could make enterprise architecture irrelevant, begun by Deloitte in the fall. Some folks in IT grumbled that Deloitte was off the mark in even raising this as an issue, but my read was that the consulting firm was grappling with a timely issue and considering all sides.

That said, I’d like to add my perspective about why the cloud most certainly does not make the enterprise architecture function irrelevant. It’s been discussed, of course, that accounting for business service organization and management — whether those services hail from the external cloud or not — is a key part of the enterprise architect’s role. Add to that the fact that enterprises are seriously invested in private clouds within their own firewalls, inside their own data centers, and managed with internal resources, or in hybrid models, and it’s hard to see how cloud computing can be separated from the enterprise architect’s purview.

Further supporting the case for enterprise engagement with private clouds are the following:

• Gartner sees private cloud investments outweighing public cloud investments for the near future. Its recent polls show that three-quarters of IT managers are deploying or plan to deploy a private cloud strategy by next year, and 75 percent expect to invest more in private clouds than in public ones through 2012.

• Cisco’s Connected World Report noted that one in three IT professionals will have more than half of the company's data and applications in private clouds within the next three years. The U.S., Brazil and Mexico are predicted leaders in private cloud adoption.

• In online polls conducted by Unisys at the end of last year, 80 percent of respondents said their organization was going to use a cloud, with the largest group (45 percent) specifying a private cloud. Twenty-one percent were looking at hybrid clouds.

• A Novell survey in the fall found that 89 percent of respondents consider private clouds to be the next logical step for organizations already implementing virtualization.

If private clouds can be thought of as services-oriented virtualization on steroids, think of all the issues the preponderance of private internal clouds raise for the enterprise, and, by extension, for the enterprise architect. For example:

• What structures need to be in place to scope up from hosting low-priority, low-critical apps in the private cloud to hosting high-priority, mission-critical ones?

• What governance needs to be assured so that you can enable maximum utilization and the elasticity that comes from a true internal multi-tenancy model?

• How can workload mobility be managed to intelligently account for policy or compliance within such models?

•      Does — or should — a virtual desktop infrastructure come into play in your private cloud architecture?

• What reference architectures are being road-mapped to provide design and best practices for porting workloads across what I like to call cloud cuddles (aka hybrid clouds), so that end-to-end transactions aren’t compromised?

Enterprise architecture, then, is no less relevant in cloud environments than it is to Web technology, XML or SOA. The enterprise architect’s domain still covers what goes into the ether (as my blogging colleague Eric Bruno has so intelligently discussed in entries like this one, and will in more to come), how those workloads scale there, and a whole bunch of other related issues. I’d argue that the cloud, in all its forms — private, public, hybrid — may very well make enterprise architects “ultra-relevant,” as systems and services are further distributed.

How are you adapting your enterprise architecture to your organization’s use of cloud computing?