Hybrid Cloud Solutions from IBM

by John Webster

Today’s Cloud Experience

Enterprise use of cloud computing has evolved from the side lines of shadow IT to the meteoric growth in enterprise usage of private, public, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments for a wide range of applications. Rapid growth in cloud usage now leads to complex private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments where a lack of administrative skills in cloud computing coupled with still maturing cloud management applications are now the biggest challenges to ongoing growth in cloud usage within the enterprise.
While it is clear that public clouds continue to be the most popular cloud platforms, private clouds have emerged from within the same environments and now dominate the cloud landscape as well. Therefore, it is no surprise that most enterprises see bridging the two—the hybrid cloud—as a strategic endpoint. In fact, survey data as shown in Figure 1 below indicates that a large majority of all enterprise cloud users (70%) are currently engaged in hybrid cloud implementations or pilot projects.

Figure 1. Percentages of US enterprises using public, private and hybrid clouds. Note that 70% of enterprises now use hybrid cloud architectures in some form. (Source: Evaluator Group Cloud Trends Analysis based on publicly available survey data.)

The ability to deliver on-premises performance and manageability with data stored in the cloud is a key requirement of the enterprise hybrid cloud. As the use of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud applications grows, there is increased pressure to create an agile cloud experience with data stored on-premises. Business application users want the speed, agility and responsiveness of the public cloud. Enterprise IT executes have gotten the message and want to deliver that same experience, but with an ability to control cost, assure quality of service (QoS) and comply with data management requirements for security, accessibility, and governance. A strategic approach built upon active data management across on-premises, private and public clouds is necessary. Active data management enables centralized IT to solve cost, performance, and corporate governance issues as the enterprise moves forward with hybrid cloud computing.

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