The Transition from Private to Hybrid Clouds

Grazed from Cloud Storage Strategy.  Author: Steve Lesem.

We discussed the advent of hybrid cloud in our earlier post on a maturity model for cloud storage. While it is important that technology providers are beginning to grapple with the requirements to move seamlessly from a private cloud to a public cloud, the assumption here is that the workload owner is willing to utilize a public cloud multi-tenant solution for their workload.  I’m not sure we’re there yet…

It is unclear to me that the marketplace and especially the higher end enterprises  (who retain and own significant IT resources and data centers) are yet willing to embrace public multi-tenant clouds.  I know they’ll eventually do so as the security solutions and their early experiences improve confidence in the public cloud.  Certainly there are non proprietary workloads that will be used for the earliest testing.  However, this is still a very nascent market, and you should expect that we have several years of work ahead of us to build out a fully functioning hybrid model that provides appropriate security and control.

I strongly agree that the level of activity is reminiscent of the late nineties.  The majors are trying to build out their cloud stacks, and they are doing that with internal development and by buying smaller companies focused on individual layers of the stack, or even a feature on the layer.  I looked at some "gee whiz" numbers from various research organizations, and saw that IDC postulates that more than one third of all digital information created on an annual basis will reside in, or at least pass through, the cloud at some point in its life cycle. 

Amazing!