Hybrid Clouds

Hybrid flowers, Hybrid cars and Hybrid clouds?

 First Published in November 2014:

The Star: On Hybrid Clouds 

Most CIOs have their heads in the cloud these days. But if they’re leading established enterprises, they’d better have their feet firmly planted on the ground.

Many CIO’s are feeling pressure – whether from CEOs, employees, customers, partners or the market - to implement the latest cloud-based IT technology for efficiency, agility and economy.

But they also have their existing IT infrastructure, and as a Malaysian CIO may say “So how??”

For these CIOs, with conflicting demands, the answer may lie in “hybrid clouds”, which combine private and public clouds and maybe even some non-clouded dedicated servers.  Say what?

Most established enterprises can’t simply close their data centers and move IT to an outside provider. In some cases they have hand-crafted, 20-year old applications that are vital to services. Such applications may simply be too fragile to move. In such cases it will often be more cost effective to keep legacy applications running on specialized servers rather than moving them to private cloud servers.  For such applications, dedicated servers may be the best option.

For many years, corporate data centers continuously required more space and more power. But the virtualization revolution that started in 1998 meant many applications could run on a single server, and most companies have been consolidating workloads on servers ever since.

A private cloud in the corporate data center will cut costs and increase flexibility, and also store and share some data and applications internally - in a private cloud, virtual servers can handle hundreds of workloads on a single physical server, and storage can be shared between applications. CIO’s can treat most of the computing capacity in the data centers as a pooled resource -- in effect, a private cloud that is allocated on demand.

Public clouds have a role to play as well, for these can be more appropriate and cost effective than private clouds under certain circumstances.  For example, new applications can be developed, and voluminous amounts of unstructured information for big data analytics, can be implemented in public clouds more quickly and without incurring large capital expenditure upfront. Public cloud capacity can be leased from cloud-hosting companies that specialize in data management, while integrating these capabilities into their existing on-premise infrastructure.

Many companies may already be using some public-cloud infrastructure. Sometimes IT departments have made a decision to use the cloud for testing or development of new applications. In other cases a business executive or a researcher has bypassed IT to use a new application, expensing the cost on a corporate credit card. In most companies, it’s important for the IT department to have a handle on all corporate data, and know what might be going off company servers.

But where to start? 

First, figure out what data and what applications fit best in which place. Then figure out where they have to interact. Get the right software tools for managing the hybrid environment.  It requires careful planning to manage a private cloud and a third-party public cloud host.  But for companies that want to get the benefit of new technology while still needing to provide bullet-proof continuity of operations, the old and the new need to work together.

Many established companies with significant IT infrastructure are making the decision to develop a hybrid cloud. For example, NiSource Inc., one of the largest natural-gas transmission companies in the U.S., recently said that it plans to move to a hybrid cloud.

Companies today typically use three types of computing: dedicated servers in the corporate data center that run key applications; pooled resources in a private cloud in the corporate data center; and resources run by public-cloud providers and accessed over the Internet. Mixing and blending any of these deployment models creates a hybrid cloud.

Adopting hybrid-cloud architecture means most enterprises already have all the bricks-and-mortar data-center space they will ever need. CIOs can stop worrying about how to enlarge their data centers or obtain more electric power for air-conditioning.

There are ample positive reasons for CIOs to embrace the cloud. Last year IBM commissioned a survey of top executives at 800 enterprises around the world about a range of issues. That study revealed that the majority are using cloud to integrate and apply mobile, social and Big Data technologies. The cloud is paying off for those companies. Those with high cloud adoption are reporting almost double the revenue growth and nearly 2.5 times higher gross profit growth than peer companies. 

Embracing the cloud makes it easier for the IT department to be seen as a partner in new initiatives for other departments. Budget constraints and the need to buy and install hardware meant that any new project required months of activity by IT before operating groups could get access.  When using a public cloud, a few days or weeks of coding by IT developers can be enough to launch a new product. Our survey found that 66 percent of organizations are using cloud to strengthen the relationship between IT and lines of business.

Embracing the cloud isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. The hybrid cloud is the route to cloud computing that will be most practical and cost-efficient for large enterprises with long-established IT departments and data centers, proving that the picture isn’t all cloudy, because you can have your cake and eat it too.