Hybrid Offers the Best of Both Worlds

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  •  Dec 12, 2013
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Strong benefits and poor regulation is pushing the adoption of hybrid cloud

Cloud computing has been in the market for eight years. However, it is only now that a clear picture is emerging with respect to its positioning in the enterprise segment. The new cloud landscape that is emerging reveals an important shift. The road ahead clearly points towards hybrid cloud. 

IT managers believe the reason why the hybrid model is emerging as the preferred model for implementing cloud is because it balances the risks with opportunities. The hybrid model helps IT managers leverage the best of both – the private and the public cloud.

Getting onto the cloud is not just a mandate for IT managers from their top management. If they are to move to the cloud, it should have some business benefits. The logical way for them would be to move certain workloads into the private cloud and access public cloud for quicker and tactical activities.

As Ashish Khanna, Assistant Vice President - Corporate IT at The Oberoi Group, says, “Cloud deployments in most organization will be hybrid. I don’t see organizations migrating all their applications on to a public cloud. They will migrate their non-critical applications on to the public cloud in the first go. The critical applications will then be migrated to a private cloud.”

Another reason why IT managers are favoring the hybrid model is out of compulsion rather than choice.“This approach of harnessing the hybrid model will help IT managers in allaying their security concerns around critical applications while providing the benefits of scalability and uptime. Going forward, there is no way a single cloud delivery model will suffice,” he says.

“Given the infrastructure and laws inIndia, who would like to risk his critical data in a public cloud?” questions Lalit Kumar, Sr Manager, IT, JBM Group. JBM is a joint venture of MSIL (Maruti Suzuki India Limited) for manufacturing of sheet metal components, welded assemblies, exhaust systems, fuel fillers and chassis and suspension parts.

“There are no laws around cloud computing. The picture around portability is not clear at all. I don’t know what will happen to my data if I plan to leave one cloud service provider to move to another. Despite so many players getting into this space, there is still no clarity around these issues. As a result, IT managers will put only low-usage and low-profile applications on public cloud while retaining mission critical applications within their premise,” he says.

Kumar himself has not risked putting his production environment into public cloud.

Another reason why hybrid cloud is finding favor amongst IT managers is because it helps them in countering the growing menace of ‘shadow IT.’“Till the time such problems are not sorted, hybrid cloud would be the most preferable option for IT managers,” he adds.

One of the biggest challenges for the IT department today is ‘Shadow IT’. Strategic business units are increasingly bypassing IT for their IT needs and making the organization vulnerable. For instance, the marketing or sales department might be sharing information with someone that could lead to a security breach. The ownership of security still remains with IT.

Through hybrid cloud enablement, an IT manager can extend the IT portfolio to different business units. This will ensure that he not only overcomes the bottleneck of ‘Shadow IT’ but also emerges as the central point of contact for business outcomes. There simply can not be multiple departments making decision with respect to IT. It will lead to chaos.

“For any new project, the IT department has to come up with a ROI/TCO matrix, get approvals, and then go in for deployment.  This is a time intensive procedure by the end of which the entire project’s timeline goes for a toss. By leveraging hybrid cloud, these bottlenecks can be overcome,” says Khanna.

On his part, Khanna is experimenting with hybrid cloud. He has already hosted workloads on cloud and while deploying any new application ensures that it is cloud ready.

The road ahead is to offer a gamut of delivery models – hybrid, private and public. However, it is beyond doubt that the fastest growing segment in the cloud space is that of hybrid cloud. A single delivery model is not solving the business problems of IT managers. Even vendors like Salesforce that earlier had only one delivery model are now supplying a box. They are approaching IT departments with private cloud also. According to a recent report, one out of every three organization wants to move to hybrid cloud. The cloud market is growing at 28 percent CAGR.

 

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