Cloud Providers: Hybrid Cloud is Here to Stay

Most of the latest cloud stats show that small and medium-sized business gravitate toward the public cloud, while enterprises with their own IT resources show a preference (and have the financial means) for building out their own private cloud. But actually many organizations are finding that a hybrid model makes the most sense for the IT needs since it blends the best of both worlds.

In fact, as a recent ZDNet blog post pointed out, service providers once looked to businesses to figure out how to build their data centers – however, in the era of cloud, the opposite is true.

Rackspace (News - Alert) CTO John Engates said during a recent panel at Interop that, in the past, the storage company looks to the enterprise to replicate what they are doing, but in the cloud era, enterprises are using service providers as a model.

“The high-end [of computing] was called enterprise class. Maybe we need to call it cloud-class now,” Engates said.

While cloud is still in its infancy in terms of adoption and standards, many cloud providers believe the hybrid cloud model is here to stay. Panelists at Interop (News - Alert) revealed some important tips for enterprises considering shifting to a hybrid-based model, including the following:

1. Know what cloud computing is and is not. Virtualization is the underlying platform for cloud computing but it is only one aspect of cloud computing. 

2. Enterprises will have to embrace a hybrid cloud computing model but they should experiment with public clouds to get a feel for the benefits before deciding on a blended cloud model. There’s plenty of time: very few mission critical applications run in the cloud today because performance and QoS tools have not matured yet.

3. Corporations (and SMBs, for that matter) must figure out which applications and data should reside on a big public cloud, and what should remain private.

4. Then, they must determine how to wrap other necessary services around them, such as security services, and how to connect their private cloud with the public cloud.

5. Enterprises must also choose the right development tools and platforms that meet their objectives, service provider executives note.

6. Enterprises must figure out how to best benefit from the automation and provisioning services of cloud providers so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel and sink tons of money into building their own cloud services that are becoming commodity services at public cloud providers.

For more advice from cloud providers, check out ZDnet’s blog post here.

In related news, storage giant EMC (News - Alert) recently unveiled 42 products as it overhauled its storage, backup, virtualization and management software portfolio with the two big themes being hybrid cloud and big data, TMCnet reported.

As IT continues to evolve, data has remained the primary source of value for businesses, according to Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer of EMC Information Infrastructure Products.

“The onset of virtualization, cloud computing and big data analytics, however, have restored data to its rightful place as the center of IT gravity,” Gelsinger said in a company statement. “The shift is swift and irreversible, from dedicated infrastructure silos built around specific applications where data is either locked in a specific application or orbits the periphery, to a data-centric approach to computing.”