Selective sourcing the hybrid of cloud services

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

Yesterday I chaired a breakfast roundtable discussion at the CIO Summit on data centre optimisation and cloud computing. A key takeaway was the term “hybrid cloud” is a bit of a misnomer and should morph into “selective cloud”. There are two competing forces in the relentless pursuit of optimised, hence agile, IT service delivery – private and public cloud computing.

On the private side organisations will continue to build, modernise and optimise their in-house data centres to aggressively drive down operating and management costs.

Meanwhile, the public cloud providers will leverage their economies of scale to offer low-cost computing services with minimal capital investment.

Either way, you’d be hard pressed to find an organisation that didn’t have a mixture of both models. Heavily capitalised organisations will be using some form of public computing service and aggressive cloud adopters will still be managing their own servers.

Hence the “hybrid” term was coined by many an industry analyst, including myself, as a best practice architecture in the immediate term.

The biggest problem is there remains a significant disparity between what is perceived to be private and public computing.

The in-house computing, storage and applications are still managed very differently from their public counterparts.

One CIO at the breakfast said after engaging with one cloud provider for a storage backup service he was only given the option of restoring the data from weekly snapshots.

In his case the cloud model, while promising a lot, was lacking in flexibility compared with in-house IT.

We will only start seeing truly hybrid cloud computing when the public and private architectures are harmonised to an extent where they work hand-in-hand.

A better description is selective cloud services because organisations are selecting “point” cloud services in conjunction with their own data centre operations.

If you’ve discovered a working hybrid cloud computing architecture, I’d love to hear about it.

Rodney Gedda is Editor of TechWorld Australia. Follow Rodney on Twitter at @rodneygedda. Rodney's e-mail address is rodney_gedda@idg.com.au. Follow TechWorld Australia on Twitter at @Techworld_AU.