For IT departments, the age of the “Instant Yes” may soon be upon us.
In the near future, IT departments will be able to accommodate any request for IT resources with a quick and complete affirmative using cloud technology.
In the beginning, cloud was nearly synonymous with the public cloud. A hosted cloud solution, the thinking went, was the only way to realize cost efficiencies and provide universal access to applications. In time it became clear that enterprises could build their own cloud solutions (private clouds), save money and have more control over important issues such as security, compliance, features and cost.
Today, private clouds are growing in popularity with enterprises that need to control information and provide unique features to their users. Meanwhile, there is a perception by some that public cloud providers have less flexibility to add new features such as hardware accelerators or software capabilities, and could be less likely to adopt new technology sooner, depending on the ROI case they can make for it.
What we’re seeing happen today in IT departments is a hybrid cloud approach where public and private cloud solutions coexist. This approach allows the strengths of each cloud type to be leveraged. For example, enterprises are beginning to utilize public cloud for development environments and disaster recovery. At the same time, enterprises are moving steady-state applications from the public cloud into the private cloud to take advantage of lower costs.
Although there are many benefits to a hybrid cloud approach, there is also one significant setback: a lack of standardized “private cloud best practices” that allow for seamless interoperability between these two environments. Generally speaking, IT departments tend to build their private clouds just as they did their traditional infrastructure, using the same hardware/software architecture with some modifications. This can result in a private cloud architecture that has little in common with the public cloud architecture, making it more difficult to share or migrate applications between them.
The answer to the hybrid cloud conundrum may ultimately be three: three different private cloud models based on either a best-of-breed approach, a reference architecture or a converged infrastructure.
In this blog series, I’ll examine these three different approaches and discuss the advantages and best practices of each in constructing a cloud solution. ▪