Unlike born-in-the-cloud companies that usually rely heavily on the public cloud for competitiveness and agility, most organisations will need to orchestrate, integrate, manage, and source a hybrid mix of cloud and non-cloud resources to satisfy legacy IT and regulatory demands (see figure below).
Model: Most organisations will have a mix of public, private, and hybrid cloud
Service: Public cloud can be sourced as SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, or BPaaS
Provider: Cloud can be sourced from Amazon, Microsoft, Softlayer or from managed cloud providers
Application: Different applications (Social, Analytics, Mobile, IoT) can run in different models and service types and can be sourced from multiple providers
Data center: The location of the application and infrastructure can be on-premise, co-located/hosted or in the public cloud.
The ability to simultaneously manage this palette of models, services, applications, providers and data centers will be a key capability underpinning effective IT transformation. Organisations that do not want to manage this all themselves should look for service providers that are capable of co-orchestrating this.
