Clouds in Boxes: Is This a New Trend?

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Lori MacVittie.

The verdict is in. Organizations are going to settle on cloud, but they’re settling on a mixture of private (on-premise) and public (off-premise). Hybrid, in the common nomenclature.

• 74 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy (RightScale, 2014 State of the Cloud Survey).
• 55 percent of respondents expect to have hybrid cloud in place within the next two years (NorthBridge Ventures & GigaOm Research, 2014 Future of Cloud Computing).
• Of the 36 percent of organizations running private clouds, nearly a third have hybrid systems (InformationWeek, Hybrid Cloud Survey).
• Half of all enterprises will have hybrid clouds by 2017 (Gartner Research). That paints a pretty picture for someone like Microsoft who, being what many considered ‘late’ to the cloud game, is giving leaders like Amazon and Google a run for their money. Literally…

It’s no secret that Google and Amazon are courting the enterprise after first having gone after green-field startups and developers respectively. Google just announced a new initiative designed to entice enterprises, focusing on networking needs like VPN tunnels and better capabilities to run what are traditionally considered enterprise workloads: CRM, ERP and SCM systems. Time will tell whether enterprises will see this as being enough to make Google an appealing enterprise partner. Interestingly, that’s something the third opponent in the cloud wars already enjoys and is certainly part of the reason it’s risen so quickly to the forefront of the battle…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/clouds-boxes-new-trend