Hybrid Cloud is the Way Forward
No one in the industry likes vendor lock-in but it is something which every enterprise has to live with, in fact, this is how the enterprise software and solutions market was originally designed to work. One of the promises of the Cloud was to break this vicious cycle of locking in with a vendor but with a plethora of Cloud offerings and service delivery models – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS etc. – and dearth of standards, there’s an acute need to federate the way in which different Cloud services talk to each other and learn to live within the same space.
Recent surveys have shown that enterprise – big and small – which have made their transition to the Cloud find it more appealing to maintain a portfolio of Cloud services from varied vendors instead of tying up with a single vendor. One reason of this trend may be the lack of turn-key solutions when it comes to SaaS offerings. For example, somewhere in the stack of a Cloud based ERP solution, you will find Amazon’s EC2 being utilized for compute but this is not the example of a hybrid Cloud deployment.
In comparison to the complexities of integrating multiple legacy and even some recent non-Cloud enterprise systems, integrating Cloud services from multiple vendors and public/private Cloud offerings to create the architecture right for your enterprise is not a nightmare, so to speak. However, the lack of standards in this space will only create diversions and roadblocks for new entrants to deal with.
Compatibility will be the key to increased Cloud adoption and further penetration into the enterprise. One possible route to achieve Cloud compatibility across the board is the Open route, which consists of five O’s
- Open Source
- Open Data
- Open Cloud
- Open APIs
- Open Standards
Open Source is already very mature and has been a driving force for much of the enterprise software landscape however, open APIs and open data are two aspects which are still evolving. Open cloud, on the other hand, is key to delivering on the real value of the Cloud – ability to deliver service, anytime, anywhere, through any cloud.
Keeping in view the demand for bringing together and tying up different Cloud services and vendors into one coherent enterprise solution, there are now solutions which offer to remove the pain of data and application migration to the Cloud and then interaction between various Cloud services in a unified deployment scenario – hybrid cloud.
Perhaps one of the selling points for hybrid cloud is the mitigation, if not elimination, of risk. Business continuity and growth demands that sensitive and even non-sensitive business data be secured and when CIOs talk about migrating to the Cloud, one of the primary concerns is often cited as data security. With hybrid cloud deployments, the risk of data security can be isolated from the mix and addressed more effectively, resulting in improved confidence of the stakeholders.
By Salman UI Haq
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