X shades of grey — Hybrid Cloud

Of the many semantic problems with that cloud metaphor that has so dominated ICT debate in recent years the main one is that it was a fuzzy grey concept or analogy in the first place. Anything but ‘Internet computing’ was preferable in the early hype stage. But then we got stuck in a descending spiral of forced sub-metaphors leading to terms strained beyond measure or meaning like ‘cloud infrastructure’, ‘pillars of the cloud’ and so on. Even though ‘architecture’ is a well understood IT term with an honourable pedigree, ‘cloud architecture’ just emphasises the contortions of language we have subjected ourselves to. The only benefit has been the almost limitless opportunities to pun and poke fun at the marketing pretensions of the cloud-mongers.

So then there was and most certainly still is Hybrid Cloud. Rather surprisingly, it actually lends a bit of clarity in a cloudy environment that offers X shades of grey. There are minor arguments about what might be a strict definition of hybrid cloud but the salient point is that it involves using different varieties of cloud computing resources (essentially public or private), usually combined with traditional directly owned resources either on-premise or co-located in a data centre.

 

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Default
It is probably fair to day that hybrid cloud is now mainstream and perhaps even the default or at least common choice. That would be partly because a significant proportion of organisations are still very wary of public cloud but also because adding cloud resources to the mix invariably requires active links to existing solutions. IDG forecasts that the proportion of applications deployed through hybrid cloud will increase over the next two years from about 16% today to an estimated 44%, so roughly three times growth.

“We are certainly seeing hybrid cloud becoming more pervasive in the last couple of years,” said Vincent McHugh, senior technical architect with Comsys. “What is driving that is that certain workloads, let’s say the newer types of application, are just more suited to cloud than to traditional infrastructure. Cloud gives the agility benefits that enterprises are looking for. Another driver is very straightforward — speed of provisioning and the ability to respond very quickly to changing workload demands, including scaling up to meet surges as well as any more lasting requirements. In essence that means time to value is rapid, which makes a very appealing business case.”

Normal considerations
All of the normal considerations of security, regulatory and other compliance strongly apply, he added. “It’s a question of the right workload in the right environment with the right governance. But hybrid enables a more flexible set of choices of what exactly runs where within a pool of resources. With the right management overlay those resources can be managed in a consistent and harmonic manner, implementing all of the organisation’s access and application policies in an integrated way across the board. That sounds easy but in fact we see it as one of the bigger IT challenges in hybrid cloud. The business side is equally important, so the right stakeholders have to be involved and everyone needs to be working to a clear and defined set of goals.”

The end result, McHugh said, can be a very comprehensive and flexible set of functionality offered to users/staff essentially as a catalogue of as-a-service applications. “Individuals, departments, teams can choose what they use and how but it is all from a properly controlled and governed set of corporate resources. In fact with the IT department brokering services in this way there is room for specialist or minority applications as-a-service because they will all be served out of the proven catalogue system within the organisation. There are enormous possibilities in this kind of Everything-as-a-Service approach for the enterprise of the future, I think, particularly now that we are in an era of increasingly software-defined ICT.”