Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds - The Essentials of Hybrid Cloud

This blog post is authored by Joe Weinman , author of Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, and the forthcoming book Digital Disciplines, which explores four business strategies to exploit emerging digital technologies such as cloud computing.

Welcome to the final installment of our Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds blog series. If you missed our first three posts: An Introduction to the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud, The Rationale for Hybrids and Hybrids in Space and Time, we invite you to read them. Today in this final installment we will review the essential technology approach to implementing a successful hybrid cloud solution and summarize the economic benefits of hybrid cloud.

Hybrid Essentials

A technology approach that seamlessly links   private infrastructure, platform, and/or software as a service with identical public cloud counterparts can minimize total cost, maximize business agility, and meet the constraints of real organizations run by humans and their complex decision-making processes and needs.  After all, the choice of public, private or hybrid should ideally be completely separate from that of application architecture and available platform components.  After all, the choice of public, private or hybrid should ideally be as simple as turning a dial and completely separate from that of application architecture and available platform components.  Loosely speaking, this is something like acquiring a new car: whether to pay cash, lease, finance, or rent shouldn’t impact one’s selection of make and model.

Requirements to enable this strategy are straightforward.  Customers should have the option to deploy an application easily in either a private cloud, public cloud, or both without any rewriting whatsoever, and automated management tools should be available to enable various application components to autoscale and shift seamlessly back and forth between public and private and to provide key data such as application performance and cost differentials, so as to intelligently optimize between the two environments.

Beyond these high-level requirements are specific technologies for migrating virtual machines, virtual hard disks, managing configuration of virtual private networks, security, policy management, and the like.

Summary

For any given need, a single solution is rarely found—within the field of computing or outside of it.  Instead, we find a mix of solution elements with various attributes: old and new, generic and custom, owned and rented.  Various configurations of hybrid architectures and their corresponding business value can be enabled by choosing a strategic, foundational cloud solution that fully supports both public and private cloud environments, organizing and skilling the IT function to both run internal production and act as a broker for external cloud services, and periodically evaluating needs and optimizing for a balance of cost, time, availability, flexibility, resiliency, user experience and performance.

Thank you for joining us for the blog series “Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds” by Joe Weinman, we hope this blog series was helpful and increased your understanding of hybrid cloud solutions.

You can read the entire “Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds” whitepaper by Joe Weinman here.

For more thoughts and insights on hybrid cloud, we invite you to join us for the “Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds” webinar hosted by Joe Weinman on 2/24. You can register for the webinar here.