The subject of cloud seems to dominate most discussions around technology these days. Indeed, it’s rare that one of these weekly columns goes by without the concept being mentioned at least in passing.
Regular readers will know that cloud is one of the four emerging technology pillars — together with mobility, Big Data, and social — currently shaping a new era of innovation across the IT universe.
And it is with good reason that of the four revolutionary comrades, cloud garners much of the attention.
Simply put, cloud has changed the fundamental nature of computing and revolutionised the way in which business gets done. And it will continue to do so over the coming years.
In fact, we predict that by 2020 clouds will stop being referred to as “public” or “private”, and ultimately they will stop being called clouds altogether as they become universally embraced as the new norm across all walks of life. Cloud is simply the new way business is done and IT is provisioned, so we had all better start getting used to it.
As we have already seen, the subject of cloud is rarely mentioned without being prefixed by the monikers “public” or “private”, and the choice is often presented as being a simple matter of one or the other. The public model, where services are provided in a virtualized environment and accessible over a public network, offers benefits such as on-demand scalability, improved reliability and flexibility, enhanced cost efficiencies, consumption-based pricing, and location independence.
Private cloud, where the services being provisioned are only accessible by a single organisation, offers greater security, privacy, and control, but comes at a significant premium — both in terms of cost and complexity.
But what if there was a third hybrid option that combined the benefits of both? Well, there is and it’s beginning to gain momentum as enterprises increasingly reach the IT breaking point, challenged by constraints around their budgets, datacenter capacity, and personnel. For a variety of financial, technological, regulatory, organizational, and cultural reasons, enterprise adoption of public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for existing business applications has been slower than many expected. This is true around the world, but particularly so here in the Middle East, where many organisations remain wary of giving up control over important workloads.
But with business velocity continuing unimpeded, the IT department’s ability to deploy, manage, and update the infrastructure required to support business outcomes and innovation is hitting a wall. Hybrid cloud provides a solution to this problem, taking into account the reality that not all applications and workloads can (or should) migrate to public clouds, at least not immediately. So what exactly is hybrid cloud and what can do it for your organisation?
Hybrid cloud is a unified IT environment encompassing public and private cloud resources. Virtual machines, cloud storage, dedicated hardware, and workloads operate seamlessly across different types of IT environments — private clouds residing in enterprise datacenters, private clouds located in colocation facilities or hosted by service provider datacenters, and external public clouds.
However, hybrid clouds are more than just the middle ground between public and private. When properly designed, hybrid clouds integrate compute, storage, security, networking, applications, and management into a common, highly orchestrated on-premise/off-premise “workspace” that enables IT operations and application developers to leverage the speed and agility of public cloud in concert with the existing tools, systems, and policies being used in the enterprise datacenter.
Ideally, applications built on traditional client/server IT architecture and operating in an enterprise datacenter can run unchanged in a federated public cloud environment. However, this optimised hybrid cloud state requires seamless application, data, and management environment and sophisticated orchestration to coordinate, federate, provision, manage, and secure heterogeneous cloud resources in an automated fashion. In the IT context, hybrid clouds bring the “outside in” and let the “inside out”.
In general terms, the wall between public and private is coming down as automation and orchestration management technologies enable IT architects to leverage their enterprise datacenters, external cloud-based resources, and corporate WANs as a comprehensive hybrid environment. Tearing down this wall can both enhance the flexibility of enterprise IT departments and help transform the organizational dynamics of enterprise IT and lines of business for the better. Hybrid cloud also facilitates centralised governance and enables long-established enterprises to continue leveraging their existing IT systems investments by providing a common architecture for both legacy and new “cloud-native” applications. Ultimately this ensures the right environment for the right workload at the right time.
The hybrid cloud services market is still maturing, but a broad array of providers from different segments of the IT industry have converged around the opportunity. This means there is an abundance of choice and a solution out there that is sure to meet your needs, if you are prepared to look hard enough to find it. I strongly urge IT leaders here in the Middle East to carefully consider the hybrid cloud model as part of their overall business and IT transformation strategies — either as a pit stop on the road to broader public cloud adoption or as an end-state destination that balances on-demand elasticity and usage-based pricing with localised control.
The columnist is group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC.
