We recently had the chance to give Information Age magazine in the UK our perspective on their questions about Hybrid Cloud. Here are the answers that Richard Garsthagen, Oracle EMEA Director of Business Development, provided:
How have most organisations been building hybrid clouds to date?
Most organizations are looking for an approach such that workloads can easily be moved from on-premise into the cloud and back and that there is a solid integration between on-premise elements and elements in public clouds. A full hybrid model, where an on-premise application can automatically extend itself into a public cloud is often still very hard to implement.
What have been the limitations of these methods?
Secure real-time two-way data synchronization; implementation of stretched networks
Are organisations right to be scared of the public cloud when it comes to business‐critical data?
Organizations should be serious about securing their critical data for both on-premise and in the public cloud. The public cloud can offer a welcome extra resource capacity and often offers more redundancy options than from a single corporate owned datacenter. It is important to also think about possible exit strategies.
CIOs are blinded by conflicting information about cloud. Simply, how can they decide what data to put where?
Sometimes there is too much focus on just looking for a new financial model, turning CAPEX into OPEX. As with cars, sometimes it is better to lease, but also sometimes it is better to buy. It is important to look at all aspects and not forget that cloud computing can also be implemented on-premise. Too often CIOs only consider the public cloud to gain a more agile environment compared to their existing IT estate, forgetting or not knowing that they can also internally make this transformation by implementing on-premise automation, self-service capabilities and chargeback and metering methods, based on highly consolidated and shared platforms.
The rise of hybrid cloud architectures has led to the creation of a new job: cloud service broker. Is this a necessary role going forward?
IT departments will see a change in their role. Instead of always thinking about how to architect and implement new solutions, they need to make new considerations, like can they just subscribe to an existing public cloud service. This does need careful considerations, validating the service provider, investigating on-premise integration possibilities. So this role of a cloud service broker will be here to stay.
How important is it to be able to easily move data between private and public clouds?
To keep things simple and not have to invest in new platforms, api and programming languages, it would be desirable that technologies in the public cloud line up with technologies used on-premise. On the other hand, some solutions are only available in the public cloud and only exposed through a set of APIs for integration.
How is the movement towards software- ‐defined data centres (SDDCs) impacting the hybrid cloud trend?
Some organisations are starting to understand that not only should the public cloud offer an agile environment, but that they can also make this transformation on-premise with the concept of a software defined data centre. In the end, the adoption of cloud computing, having an agile, elastic, self service IT environment is the goal. When this adoption on-premise can be extended it will increase the ease of creating hybrid clouds.
What are the most common hybrid architectures that we will see formed over the next year, and why?
Today: mainly just good solid integration between elements on-premise and in the public cloud
Near term: the ability to dynamically move and provision workloads into either private or public clouds based on the SLA requirements
Long term: Full hybrid cloud concept, where a single application can run on either private or public cloud and offer a very elastic and redundant solution