COMMENT
BUT BEFORE JUMPING
HEAD FIRST INTO
HYBRID CLOUD,
ENTERPRISES
MUST CONSIDER
THE REASONS FOR
DOING SO. IT’S VITAL
TO MAP OUT THE
IMPLICATIONS OF THE
MOVE, THE TYPES
OF WORKLOADS IT
WILL BE USED FOR
AND THE BUSINESS
OUTCOMES THAT CAN
BE ACHIEVED BEFORE
EMBARKING ON THE
HYBRID JOURNEY
T
he hybrid cloud trend has been
confirmed by leading analyst
firms, with IDC predicting
organisations will require a mainly
cloud-based IT environment by 2019
and 451 Research claiming that public
storage spend will double in the next two
years as demand for on-premise storage
declines.
Major enterprises going hybrid
Predictions of hybrid cloud’s promise
have seen the world’s largest technology
organisations begin to lay major plans
for a hybrid future. For example, Hewlett
Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Microsoft
recently created an innovation centre in
Seattle that will speed up hybrid cloud
adoption and help customers test hybrid
solutions and use cases, such as HPE /
Azure Stack environments.
AWS and VMware have also partnered
on a hybrid cloud offering that
Amazon claims will allow customers
to use VMware’s virtualisation and
management software to deploy and
manage workloads across all on-
premises and AWS Cloud environments.
Another good example is CERN, the
European organisation for nuclear
research, launching a hybrid cloud
scheme to support its high-performance
data-intensive research. The project
will be powered by 7,000 servers and
190,000 cores and is being partly
funded by the European Commission.
Why hybrid?
With disruptive leaders across all
industries now increasingly embracing
the public, hybrid and multi-cloud space,
those that still aren’t will soon find
themselves left behind.
Hybrid is gaining in popularity as it
offers not only the flexibility and data
deployment benefits of public cloud, but
also provides the security assurance of
on-premises, private cloud – effectively
giving businesses the best of both
worlds. This means organisations can
now store their most important or
sensitive data on the private cloud,
while storing other resources on public
networks.
24
INTELLIGENTCIO
RICHARD AGNEW, VP NW EMEA AT
VEEAM SOFTWARE
But before jumping head first into
hybrid cloud, enterprises must consider
the reasons for doing so. It’s vital to
map out the implications of the move,
the types of workloads it will be used
for and the business outcomes that can
be achieved before embarking on the
hybrid journey.
The move towards hybrid cloud makes
the integrity of data and services a
major priority for enterprises. It will
therefore be important to get the
right mix of on-premise and various
as-a-service offerings, to ensure data
is always available and synchronised
across multiple platforms.
Guarantee data availability
The rising demand for cloud is
ultimately being fuelled by businesses
wanting to embrace the digital
transformation process. The modern
enterprise needs to be founded on key
technologies provided by virtualisation,
modern storage systems and cloud
technologies to be fully transformative.
This puts strain on the availability of
data and information, as it involves
updating legacy systems and investing
time and money.
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