Hybrid Cloud: Next Wave of Cloud Computing

Analysis and opinion of the future of cloud computing. eprobe Research is a leading market intelligence and consulting organization headquartered in India.

The companies who are looking at private cloud today have employees more than 1000 plus. Private cloud may be the most popular form of cloud computing around the world but the huge SMB sector in India are more likely to adopt public cloud because it gives them scalability and flexibility.

Today the most popular trend seen in cloud computing is to move enterprise level applications to private cloud and less critical applications are on public cloud. CIOs or the key decision makers of the companies are majorly concerned on the security, bandwidth and performance. Performance concerns are high for both public and private cloud in India.

New Dynamics of Hybrid Cloud

Further down the road cloud computing will become hybrid with application workload dynamically shifting between internal and external clouds. If this happens the real distinction between public and private cloud will start to fall apart.

Hybrid cloud is the combination of two environments and it requires specially created software and management tools and this further allows the workflow to happen between the environments. Today an organization especially the upper mid market and the large enterprises in India that had some usage of both public cloud and private cloud will move to hybrid cloud environment in their enterprise architecture. Hybrid solutions will give companies simpler and more affordable solutions. A good example of hybrid cloud is having all sensitive client files and financial data backed up inside company’s private cloud while everyday general computing is done in a public cloud.

Hybrid Cloud

Positive Aspects

It is a highly virtualized internal infrastructure that can be augmented with public cloud resources – from one or more external providers – as and when they are needed. These resources would be integrated seamlessly and perhaps even provisioned automatically.

In the true hybrid model, a company’s workloads are being moved to a provider’s environment, but the assets are still owned by the customer; and they want to be able to manage and patch those assets, as well as get real-time application performance measurements.

It brings a good balance between the customization and security of a private cloud and simplicity and affordability of a public cloud.

Negative Aspects

Complex infrastructure set-up for end user organization – Involves very high cost of building and managing such a complex infrastructure.

Multiple public cloud services would be the challenge of managing such a highly distributed system. What is needed is a systems management platform that can monitor and control both internal and external cloud systems with equal efficacy.

Network latency is high so to remove this obstacle WAN acceleration is a must, but this is yet another financial burden that jeopardizes the potential cost benefits of the exercise.

Snippets on Hybrid Cloud

• The infrastructure suppliers clearly see hybrid cloud computing as a potential money - spinner. Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and VMware all have products designed to help organizations to extend their internal infrastructure onto public cloud platforms. 
• Open source infrastructure vendor Red Hat is pursuing the hybrid cloud opportunity. In September 2009 it launched Deltacloud, a system that allows organizations to tie together various cloud-based systems through a single interface. The aim is “to enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts and applications which can interoperate across the public and private clouds,” the company said at the time.
• Intel is one of the major vendors who have entered cloud market with their Hybrid cloud solutions which already launched in the North America Market (USA and Canada) and will soon be launched in India and Asia Pacific countries.

Conclusion

Eventually, the lines between public and private cloud will blur and customers will be either on the private or the public cloud. Google has started offering applets (downloadable appliances), that let users deploy the company’s cloud-based offerings internally. An offline version of its Gmail product is also available. IBM and Juniper have collaborated together and have aimed at managing hybrid clouds. Initiatives like these will make more enterprises look at the hybrid cloud.

This content was provided by eprobe Research Private Limited. Visit their website at www.eproberesearch.com.

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