There is more than just private, public, and hybrid cloud. Many IT customers will need to orchestrate a hybrid mix of cloud and non-cloud IT resources for some time. The METISfiles defines eight different IT environments that will coexist in the foreseeable future. Four of these environments are homogeneous: private cloud, public cloud, legacy IT, and outsourcing. Four of these environments are hybrid: hybrid cloud, hybrid hosting, hybrid operations, and hybrid architecture. The figure below provides the segmentation and definition detail.
As we have done in our earlier posts on cloud, we map IT resources along an operational and an architectural axis. Hybrid resources are defined by the intersection of private and shared infrastructure, private and shared operations, and legacy and on-demand architecture.
Hybrid clouds combine private infrastructure and operations with shared infrastructure and operations. A typical hybrid cloud implementation uses the private cloud environment as a secure on-premise virtualized IT environment with the public cloud available for peak or temporary storage, compute, test, or development work.
Hybrid hosting also combines private and shared infrastructure, but within a shared, outsourced operations environment. The added value that hybrid hosting delivers over hybrid clouds is that parts or all of the operational hassle is outsourced to the hosting provider. In addition, the shared infrastructure can be located closer to the privately hosted infrastructure, thus providing better performance.
Hybrid operations combine private and shared operations. Hybrid operations are well known to many enterprises, and they range from supplying temporary personnel, to providing managed services.
Hybrid architecture combines private legacy IT such as client/server with private on-demand IT such as private cloud.
It is highly likely that enterprise IT will be a patchwork with some apps, like email and web conferencing, in the public cloud, some apps like ERP in the private or hybrid cloud, some services like desktop and application management in outsourcing, etc. Managing the infrastructure, platform, and software patchwork will provide headaches to IT managers for considerable time. To make life easier for the CIO there are now several vendors of cloud systems management software that automate these tasks. The market for these apps is predicted to reach $2.5 billion by 2015.
What hybrid resources are you looking to deploy and why? What’s your opinion on hybrid hosting? Let us know!
The future – legacy and cloud go together.
In the short term organisations are maximising their existing software investments by using applications such as iDocuments to combine legacy and cloud enabling them to deply cloud based applications and services for purchasing, timesheets, expenses and self service.