At Cloud Connect, the Hybrid Debate Rages On
Digg
Reddit
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
BuzzBy Ellen Rubin
While some basic consensus has been reached about the definition of cloud computing (although perhaps it’s mainly exhaustion on the part of the definers), a new debate appears to be raging based on many discussions this week at the Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara. Hybrid clouds were the talk of the show, and the boundaries between private and public clouds are rapidly emerging as battlegrounds for vendors and pundits.
At CloudSwitch, we’ve been evangelists of the hybrid cloud since our founding days, and we’ve spent some time discussing internal/external and public/private trade-offs. The fact is that for most enterprises, a hybrid (or ‘federated’ in my preferred word choice) environment is the most likely computing strategy. This is because different applications require different technical capabilities and are governed by different business requirements. Some will stay behind the firewall (at least in part, if not in their entirety), while others can take advantage of external cloud offerings, be they public or private.
Most sessions at the Cloud Connect event included the hybrid issue, with much debate about the terms used. As with cloud computing, it’s time to put aside discussions about definitions and get down to the pragmatic decisions that have to be made. The key is to stay focused on the applications: which apps are your core competencies, require specialized hardware, or contain compliance/highly sensitive data? Which ones are ‘spikey’ in nature, allowing them to benefit most from cloud economics? Which ones are bandwidth-intensive and tightly coupled to other apps? Which ones have specific SLA requirements to meet customer demands?
These are the right questions to be thinking about – to match the right apps to the right computing environment. In the end, enterprise users don’t care as much about what the cloud offering is called, as they do about provisioning their specific app quickly, protecting it from security threats, and scaling and managing it as required by the business. The ability to move apps seamlessly and securely between multiple environments is a critical part of making this work, and is the linchpin of cloud federation. If you don’t need to worry about the boundaries between cloud offerings, you can embrace them all in the combinations and permutations that meet your needs.
Reader Comments
There are no comments yet. Be the first to create one!
