Meeting the Challenges of Hybrid Cloud

Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. Author: Jason Dover.

"Even though you might not realize it, over 95 percent of you are already consumers of cloud computing services." I vividly recall this opening statement by a speaker at a tech conference several years ago, just after he asked everyone to answer by a show of hands whether they were Yahoo and Gmail users. We’re already at a point in the lifecycle of cloud computing where it is beyond the phase of nebulous marketing hype.

The formation of the cloud and the need for the hybrid cloud

Although the mid-2000s marked the beginning of cloud computing as a household name, the concepts were born more than five decades ago. In the 1950s, mainframe computing laid the groundwork of pooled resources in a cloud-like infrastructure shared by dispersed users. Technologists of the 1960s and 1970s introduced the world to a vision of an interconnected globe with access to easily scalable programs, resources and data, regardless of location and without the bounds of a rigid system infrastructure…

Fast forward to 2002 and then again to 2006, when Amazon delivered a resurgence of this notion with the development of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and then Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This made possible the delivery of cloud-based storage and compute so companies can rapidly provision services without large capital expenditures or the limitations of in-house infrastructre. Since then, Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) frameworks have multiplied by an order of magnitude. IT decision-makers now have endless options for leveraging public cloud service offerings to augment their overall IT delivery strategy…

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