Will hybrid clouds be solution-driven?

A recent GigaOm article on Amazon’s enterprise cloud ambitions struck a chord after I landed at AWS reInvent.
A while back, I had written about the Public Versus Private Cloud Trap and a reader suggested that the ‘name game’ is merely a battle between VMware and Amazon who are, in effect, marketing to their strengths.

A recent Gartner webinar (‘Private Cloud Computing and the Future of Infrastructure’) that discussed the emergence of hybrid cloud only served to reaffirm my friend’s opinion. One of the key takeaways was how “the need for speed” is driving enterprises to think beyond private cloud – and, at least in some elements, more about a hybrid cloud.

Who will emerge as the champion of hybrid cloud? For now, it’s not clear. Perhaps neither Amazon nor VMware will champion the hybrid cloud until someone else does. Maybe it will be late to the party with core strengths in applications, operating systems or even co-location.

Whatever form it comes in, I’m inclined to think that the shift won’t be driven by any single vendor, but rather by the emergence of a new generation of solutions that leverage the power of both private and public to transform physical data centres into elastic, programmable data centres.

Hybrid cloud may instead be championed by enterprises who want faster and more robust solutions to challenges in DevTest cloning and patching, or failover/recovery – or even the ability to simply migrate from one premise or environment to another, based on changing business or regulatory drivers.

Think cloud cloning, cloud failover, cloud migration and even cloud bursting as solutions evolve that allow enterprises to run apps in the public cloud as extensions of the physical data centre. While the public cloud brought us the opportunity to run isolated or custom apps in the public cloud, hybrid clouds will bring us boundless data centres that reach beyond physical location lock-in.

Topics: Technology, IT, Mobility