A Hybrid Cloud May Be the Answer for Midsize Businesses

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

Despite years of success and a certain ubiquitousness in the lives of consumers, the cloud still has a long way to go to completely transform the enterprise data center. As time progresses, it would appear that complete public cloud adoption may never happen. Midsize businesses that think their only options are the openness of the public cloud and the closed confines of their data center are overlooking another option that might provide the best of both worlds: The hybrid cloud.

The Truth about Private and Hybrid Clouds

There is a gap in understanding that is preventing many IT professionals from fully understanding just what the cloud can do for their company. Virtualization, in which large-scale hardware segments itself into numerous instances, is a powerful tool and an integrated part of the cloud but is not itself a cloud solution. Virtualization is indeed a starting point for the cloud, but an IT department that believes it is harnessing the cloud optimally through the exclusive use of virtualization is missing the bigger picture…

A true cloud computing solution offers features that make it much more than just a virtualized environment. These features include IT self-service, whereby end users are empowered to provision their own IT needs, and intelligent IT management, which allows users to regulate and monitor the expenditure of IT resources. Although midsize businesses are leading the way in virtualization, they are falling behind when it comes to putting true cloud tools in place…

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