On April 29 at Computerworld’s OSBC Conference in San Francisco CloudVelocity CTO and Co-Founder Anand Iyengar be participating on a panel discussing hybrid cloud with execs from Citrix, Microsoft, and PlumGrid, moderated by Mayfield Fund’s Robin Vasan. Here is the session’s abstract.  We would love to see you there:

Public and private clouds have set the stage for a massive revolution in the way IT teams operate, from app owners and developers to architects and CIOs.  Yet both operating models come up short for many teams because of a variety of issues, including security, control and unplanned downtime.  The longer term answer is hybrid cloud, or infrastructure that provides the ability for apps to operate seamlessly across clouds and data centers. This panel will discuss both the promise and technical obstacles of hybrid cloud and recent developments that suggest that hybrid cloud may become a reality on 2013, and what that could mean for enterprise IT and software devops teams.

The session will be at 4:00. See the OSBC Agenda for more details.

Speakers:

Sameer Dholakia, GM of Cloud Platforms, Citrix

Anand Iyenfar, Chief Technology Officer & Co-founder, CloudVelocity

Pere Monclus, Chief Technology Officer, PlumGrid

Ursheet Parikh, GM of Server & Tools, Microsoft

Mathew Lodge, VP Cloud Services, VMware

Moderator: Robin Vasan, General Partner, Mayfield Fund

When VMware announced its hybrid cloud initiative it made perfect sense.  The hybrid cloud market could provide substantial growth opportunities for VMware, as discussed in VMware Crosses the Rubicon and Hybrid is a Whole New Cloud.  Yet one respected tech analyst has recently suggested that VMware’s hybrid cloud may be too late.

Amazon (AMZN) could be the clearest benefactor of the hybrid cloud operating model if it accelerates the enterprise adoption of off premise cloud services, especially if it occurs before VMware (or Microsoft) is ready with an equivalent offering.

As discussed previously, the total addressable market for VMware server virtualization and private cloud is about $50B dollars, per a VMware presentation made late in 2012.  Amazon’s AWS revenues, representing an estimated 90% of the public cloud market, were under $3B.  This suggests a wide gulf between the public cloud and private cloud market and an even larger $60B hybrid cloud market that is available to the victors.

Private cloud is where the money is, because enterprises can get additional agility and efficiency without compromising the premise-grade controls over their IT operations.  The public cloud is also very much a commodity service while the private cloud has a robust assortment of ecosystem services and specializations.  Hybrid cloud is what enterprises want, despite the public and private cloud marketing machines.

Today hybrid cloud is too difficult and solutions too immature.  Yet the promise is so massive that service providers and large enterprises are already evaluating new solutions for devtest agility in the cloud, cloud migration and cloud-enabled disaster recovery in order to increase agility and achieve higher levels of protection and scale without more dedicated hardware.

A broad assortment of established enterprise tech vendors has been making hybrid cloud announcements, despite their inability to integrate customer data centers with clouds. They get it; and they’ve invested in confusing their customers (see, for example my Did You Say Hybrid Cloud? blog).  Yet Amazon on a product level is moving in that hybrid direction while maintaining a public cloud marketing posture, further enabling the confusion that does not benefit their new enterprise sales teams as well as others within the company.

Amazon clearly understands that public IaaS is too limiting, and has made a series of smart improvements to its cloud offerings that align them more closely to enterprise requirements.  It is possible and reasonable to suggest that Amazon’s enhancements (along with Azure’s coming grand entrance) may have forced VMware’s hand into its own IaaS offering, much to the unease of some key VMware partners.  Yet Amazon today is still stuck in the public cloud mindset.  Note, for example, a comment from my Cloud Predictions for 2013:

In 2013 Amazon will acknowledge the hybrid cloud and claim that the hybrid and public clouds are for all intents and purposes identical.  They will be right, yet they will have missed an opportunity to lead on this point in 2012 (see Two Weeks in Vegas) before their new competitors were ready.  Hybrid cloud leadership will be up for grabs as Microsoft, HP, IBM, VMware, Verizon, Rackspace and even Cisco vie for leadership in what could arguable be the largest new tech category in recent memory.   

That public cloud myopia on the part of Amazon, which was so prevalent at last year’s AWS reInvent Conference, is an albatross around the neck of what has otherwise been perhaps one of the most successful and revolutionary launches since… online bookselling.  Amazon’s future success may depend more upon its ability to lead the cloud market versus being a former first mover.

I received an email from the team at CloudCheckr with some recently conducted public cloud useability survey research findings.  While I cannot directly vouch for the accuracy and the findings themselves  I did find them compelling enough to share with Archimedius readers.  The data certainly plays to the argument that the public cloud does require specialized tools and skills to properly leverage.

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CloudCheckr’s Amazon Web Services Survey Results – March 2013

We were heartened when AWS made Trusted Advisor free for the month of March. This was an implicit acknowledgement of what many have long known: AWS is extremely complex and it is challenging for users to provision and control their AWS infrastructure properly. 

We took the AWS announcement as an opportunity to conduct an internal survey of our customers’ usage. We compared the initial assessments of 400 of our users’ accounts against our 125+ best practice checks for proper configurations and policies. Our best practice checks span 3 key categories: Cost, Availability, and Security.  We limited our survey to users with 10 or more running EC2 instances.  In aggregate, the users were running more than 16,000 EC2 instances.

We were surprised to discover that nearly every customer (99%) experienced at least one serious exception.  Beyond this top level takeaway, our primary conclusion was that controlling cost may grab the headlines, but users also need to button up a large number of availability and security issues.

When considering availability, there were serious configuration issues that were common across a high percentage of users. Users repeatedly failed to optimally configure Auto Scaling and ELB. The failure to create sufficient EBS snapshots was an almost universal issue.

Although users passed more of our security checks, the exceptions which did arise were serious. Many of the most commons security issues were found in configurations for S3, where nearly 1 in 5 users allowed unfettered access to their buckets through “Upload /Delete” or “Edit Permissions” set to everyone. As we explained in an earlier whitepaper, anyone using a simple bucket finder tool could locate and access these buckets.

Beyond the numbers, we also interviewed customers to gather qualitative feedback from users on some of the more interesting data points. 

If the findings of this survey sparks questions about how well your AWS account is configured, CloudCheckr offers a free account that you can set up in minutes.  Simply enter read only credentials from your AWS account and CloudCheckr will assess your configurations and policies in just a few minutes:  https://app.cloudcheckr.com/LogOn/Registration

Conclusions by Area

Conclusions based upon Cost Exceptions:

As noted, our sample was comprised of 16,047 instances. The sample group spent a total of $2,254,987 per month on EC2 (and its associated costs) for average monthly cost per customer of $7516. Of course, we noted the mismatch between quantity and cost – spot instances represent 8% of the quantity but only 1.4% of the cost. This is due to the significantly less expensive price of spot instances compared to on demand.

When we looked at the Cost Exceptions, we found that 96% of all users experienced at least 1 exception (with many experiencing multiple exceptions). In total, we found that users who adopted our recommended instance sizing and purchasing type were able to save an average of $3974 per month for an aggregate total of $1,192,212 per month.

 

This suggested that price optimization remains a large hurdle for AWS users who rely on native AWS tools. Users consistently fail to optimize purchasing and also fail to optimize utilization. These combined issues meant that the average customer pays nearly twice as much as necessary for resources to achieve proper performance for their technology.

 

To further examine this behavior, we interviewed a number of customers.  We interviewed customers who exclusively purchased on-demand and customers who used multiple purchasing types.

 

Here were their answers (summarized and consolidated):

• Spot instances worry users – there is a general concern of: “what if the price spikes and my instance is terminated?” This fear exists despite the fact that spikes occur very rarely, warnings are available, and proper configuration can significantly mitigate this “surprise termination” risk.
• It is difficult and time consuming to map the cost scenarios for purchasing reserved instances. The customers who did make this transition had cobbled together home grown spreadsheets as a way of supporting this business decision.  The ones who didn’t make this effort made a gut estimate that it wasn’t worth the time.  AWS was cost effective enough and the time and effort for modeling the transition was an opportunity cost taken away from building and managing their technology.
• The intricacies of matching the configurations between on demand instances and reserved instances while taking into consideration auto scaling and other necessary configurations were daunting. Many felt it was not worth the effort.
• Amazon’s own process for regularly lowering prices is a deterrent to purchasing RIs. This is especially true for RIs with a 3 year commitment.  In fact, within the customers who did purchase RI, none expressed a desire to purchase RIs with a 3 year commitment. All supported their decision by referencing the regular AWS price drops combined with the fact that they could not accurately predict their business requirements 3 years out.

 

 

Conclusions based upon Availability Exceptions:

We compared our users against our Availability best practices and found that nearly 98% suffered from at least 1 exception. We hypothesized that this was due to the overall complexity of AWS and interviewed some of our users for confirmation. Here is what we found from those interviews:

• Users were generally surprised with the exceptions. They believed that they “had done everything right” but then realized that they underestimated the complexity of AWS.
• Users were often unsure of exactly why something needed to be remedied. The underlying architecture of AWS continues to evolve and users have a difficult time keeping up to speed with new services and enhancements.
• AWS dynamism played a large role in the number of exceptions. Users commented that they often fixed exceptions and, after a week of usage, found new exceptions had arisen.
• Users remained very happy with the overall level of service from AWS. Despite the exceptions which could diminish overall availability, the users still found that AWS offered tremendous functionality advantages.

 

 

Conclusion bases upon Security Exceptions:

Finally, we looked at security. Here we found that 44% of our users had at least one serious exception present during the initial scan. The most serious and common exceptions occurred within S3 usage and bucket permissioning. Given the differences in cloud v. data center architecture, this was not entirely surprising. We interviewed our users about this area and here is what we found:

• The AWS management console offered little functionality for helping with S3 security. It does not provide a use friendly means of monitoring and controlling S3 inventory and usage. In fact, we found that most of our users were surprised when the inventory was reported. They often had 300-500% more buckets, objects and storage than they expected.
• Price = Importance, S3 is often an afterthought for users. Because it is so inexpensive users do not audit it as closely as EC2 and other more expensive services and rarely create and implement formal policies for S3 usage.  The time and effort required to log into each region one by one to collect S3 information and download data through the Management console was not worth the effort relative to spend.
• Given the low cost and lack of formal policies, team members throw up high volumes of objects and buckets knowing that they can store huge amounts of data at a minimal cost.  Since users did not audit what they had stored, they could not determine the level of security.

 

Underlying Data Summary

 

Cost:                                                                                                                                             Any exception 96%

The total of 16,047 instances was broken in the following categories:

• On Demand:       78%    (12,517 instances)
• Reserved:            14%    (2,247 instances)
• Spot:                     8%      (1,284 instances)

 

The instance purchasing was broken down as follows:

• On Demand:        89.7%  ($2,023,623)
• Reserved:            8.9%     ($199,803)
• Spot:                     1.4%     ($31,561)

 

Common Cost Exceptions we found:

• Idle EC2 Instances                                                                                                      36%
• Underutilized EC2 Instances                                                                                     84%
• EC2 Reserved Instance Possible Matching Mistake                                             17%
• Unused Elastic IP                                                                                                        59%

 

Availability:                                                                                                                                Any exception 98%

Here, broken out by service, are some highlights of common and serious exceptions that we found:

Service Type:                                                                                                       Customers with Exceptions

EC2:                                                                                                                                       Any exception               95%

 

• EBS Volumes That Need Snapshots                                                                         91%
• Over Utilized EC2 Instances                                                                                      22%

 

Auto Scaling:                                                                                                                      Any exception               66%

 

• Auto Scaling Groups Not Being Utilized  For All EC2 Instances                          57%                       
• All Auto Scaling Groups Not Utilizing Multiple Availability Zones                      34%                       
• Auto Scaling Launch Configuration Referencing Invalid Security Group          22%
• Auto Scaling Launch Configuration Referencing Invalid AMI                             18%
• Auto Scaling Launch Configuration Referencing Invalid Key Pair                      16%

 

ELB:                                                                                                                                       Any exception               42%

 

• Elastic Load Balancers Not Utilizing Multiple Availability Zones                       37%
• Elastic Load Balancers With Fewer Than Two Healthy Instances                     21%

 

 

Security:                                                                                                                                      Any exception               46%

 

These were the most common exceptions that we found:

• EC2 Security Groups Allowing Access To Broad IP Ranges                                 36%
• S3 Bucket(s) With ‘Upload/Delete’ Permission Set To Everyone                       16%
• S3 Bucket(s) With ‘View Permissions’ Permission Set To Everyone                   24%
• S3 Bucket(s) With ‘Edit Permissions’ Permission Set To Everyone                     14%

 

 

VMware’s (VMW) recent hybrid cloud announcement was both expected and yet provocative. It falls into a pattern of successful moves made in virtualization security and networking as the company moves to grow its addressable market by virtualizing servers and delivering increased IT agility, efficiency and economy.

In 2009 I talked about how VMware, through acquisitions and engineering, entered the security space despite a robust virtualization security ecosystem (see VMware Crosses the Rubicon – March 2009).  VMware was threatened then by the new security challenges being brought into the production data center by virtualization and the inability of its partners to move fast enough to address them.

There were both technology and business case issues to the virtualization ecosystem challenge in those days.  VMware responded to the tepid ecosystem progress at least in part by buying (my alma mater) Blue Lane Technologies for its firewall and advanced intrusion prevention capabilities. Many of those capabilities became the core of VMware’s security offerings.

Today VMware is caught between success in the private cloud (server virtualization) and the rapid rise of public cloud leader Amazon (AMZN) along with the high profile entry of Microsoft Azure (MSFT) into the hybrid cloud space. Today enterprises can see three different cloud visions from three very powerful and capable companies.

If I were to summarize where the three clouds are today I would say that the public cloud is where the buzz is; the private cloud is where the enterprise money is; and the hybrid cloud is where the future is.

Hybrid cloud is the natural extension of the private cloud. It is an operating model whereby enterprises can get the benefits of the public cloud (primarily agility and scalability) with the control of the private cloud (primarily security). This has been discussed previously (and more extensively) at Seeking Alpha (see Hybrid is a Whole New Cloud).

In short, the public cloud has not attracted material enterprise spend, because of control and security issues, while the virtualization-driven private cloud has had its own set of issues, including virtualization vendor lock-in.

As mentioned before in hybrid cloud, the hybrid cloud market(TAM) could be sizable, perhaps as high as $60B (based on hybrid cloud software running on 30M servers to be shipped over the next three years and a comparable $2k/server unit price and a three year refresh rate), compared to VMware’s existing $50B total addressable market. Amazon’s estimated public cloud revenues are estimated to be under $3B for 2012 (see Amazons Cloud Revenues Examined).

There has been plenty of discussion about VMware versus Amazon, so I would like to explore the context of some other highly relevant battles.

Microsoft

As hybrid cloud emerged on the scene it presented both a threat and an opportunity to VMware.  It is the natural evolution of server virtualization; indeed, hybrid cloud could be thought of as cloud virtualization.  At the same time Microsoft’s installed base, combined with its new Azure cloud offering creates an even more promising opening for the Redmond powerhouse than its first major battle with VMware over server virtualization.

A true hybrid cloud operating model is the seamless integration of both public and private clouds for both existing and new enterprise apps, without requiring server virtualization.  With that definition in mind it is easy to understand why Microsoft could be very interested in the rapid evolution of hybrid cloud while VMware might have a more tentative stance.

Microsoft could use the hybrid cloud to decouple VMware from its strong position in server virtualization, by embracing the seamless hybrid cloud along with its Azure offering. Think cloud virtualization without requiring server virtualization.  In some respects, VMware has no choice but to embrace hybrid cloud and cloud virtualization, and position itself as a potential competitor to even its most strategic partners.

Service Providers

Many VMware service provider partners are building their own hybrid clouds as a complementary offering to the VMware private cloud.  Until now it was a clear win/win for both.  Yet that proposition has now become muddled.  Some of those partners (who have followed VMware over the years) have no doubt noted how VMware’s hybrid cloud move is very similar to VMware’s first moves within the virtualization security ecosystem, in which VMware moved aggressively with new products that competed directly with some security ecosystem members.  Still others likely have enjoyed many years of robust cooperation.

Hardware and Software Players

In addition, you can expect a new generation of hybrid cloud killer apps, reshaping how software and IT services are delivered. See, for example: The Cloud’s Next Killer Apps.  Hybrid cloud solutions will likely deliver levels of agility, protection and scale that have been impractical for most organizations in the private and public cloud operating modes.

So as VMware crosses the Rubicon yet again, it promises to keep disrupting tired status quos and perhaps even a few new and vibrant ones.  One thing is clear, IT is about to undergo a transformation to more dynamic, elastic and resilient operating models that will likely depend less on dedicated hardware and more on agility, resilience and scale.

VMware has emerged as a world-class disruptor.  Looking forward, it certainly has the momentum and the brand to continue to upend established markets.  Yet as it grows it runs the risks of upending its own markets and enabling competitive inroads like never before.  2013 and 2014 should turn out to be pivotal years for VMware and at least a dozen well established companies, including Microsoft.  Based on my own estimates (mentioned earlier), hybrid cloud could be a potential $30B to $60B market.  Much of that spending may come from existing IT categories and one of them could be server virtualization (private cloud).

There have been a multitude of hybrid cloud news announcements so far this year, many confusing readers by blurring the lines between public and private clouds, yet still not addressing the challenge of hybrid cloud automation and the importance of synergy.

Without hybrid cloud automation there is minimal synergy between clouds.  Let me illustrate the point with two illustrations:

Illustration 1: The Hybrid Cloud Operating Model

The blue shading conveys the seamless integration and management off all environments and locations, including public and private cloud. There is no lock-in between public and private, no virtualization requirement, no separation of clouds for production versus pre-production.

This is a unified environment with apps and services capable of being deployed where needed as needed for protection, (think cloud continuity), devtest and patching (think cloud cloning), as well as cloud bursting and new solutions that we haven’t yet imagined.

To show the power of synergy I created a chart showing the relative (theoretical) payoffs of hybrid cloud virtualization over server virtualization around key efficiency, scalability, availability and protection metrics.

Illustration 2: The Power of Hybrid Cloud versus Server Virtualization

This chart doesn’t present data; instead it argues that a single hybrid cloud will be more scalable, more resilient, more agile, etc. than the same environment confined within a private cloud or a data center or both.  Comparing two private clouds, for example, to a hybrid cloud is like arguing that 10+10=10(10) or perhaps even 10¹⁰.  Results will obviously vary and there is obviously room for discussion around each relative score.

The chart articulates why it makes more economic sense to have strategic agility and control, with the ability to operate existing and virtual apps where needed, as needed, without lock-in and on a platform that supports both pre-production and production environments (not one or the other).

As more IaaS options emerge over the next few years, it makes sense to keep your hybrid cloud options open versus being locked-in to any single cloud, private or public.

That is why I find the idea of a hybrid cloud so compelling and revolutionary: the power of synergy.

The term hybrid cloud is replacing cloud computing as one of the most-hyped terms of 2013 because it articulates a cloud operating model (think cloud virtualization) that most if not all enterprises will find appealing.

Hybrid cloud promises to allow enterprises to operate seamlessly across multiple premise and cloud environments as if they are all part of a cohesive, synergistic operating environment.  What server virtualization has done for hardware, cloud virtualization promises to do for clouds. I think that explains much of the interest.

Synergy is really the most powerful payoff of a hybrid cloud model, as I mentioned in hybrid cloud and the power of synergy a few days ago.  Yet very few hybrid clouds (as they are called) deliver true synergy. More coming on this topic.

That is why I enjoyed reading Zen’s hybrid cloud blog as well as Martin’s CloudVelocity Rocks blog. Both start talking about specific hybrid cloud payoffs and how CloudVelocity is different from the pack of traditional solutions. Well worth reading.

Thanks Zen and Martin for your time and interest. We thoroughly enjoyed each briefing and demonstration.

When you enable a true hybrid cloud you, in effect, virtualize the clouds (public and private).  Just like server virtualization allowed seamless orchestration across servers, hybrid cloud will allow seamless orchestration across data centers and clouds.

If a private cloud is a collection of hypervisors running as a single instance, a hybrid cloud is a collection of data centers and clouds running as a single instance.

So let’s simply call hybrid cloud a form of cloud virtualization.  That should help to clear up all of the confusion between heterogeneous clouds being marketed as hybrid clouds, as I mentioned in The Power of Synergy.

A hybrid cloud delivers strategic agility, protection and scalability, on a grander scale than server virtualization. It allows enterprises to utilize a multitude of clouds without lock-in.

Cloud virtualization is the natural evolution of server virtualization.  And a special thanks to the consummate gentleman Martin MacLeod for his recent blog on CloudVelocity at BladeWatch.

It was great to catch up with Martin and take him through the demo.

 

Top 10 Cloud Blogs

The public cloud has been promoted as a low cost alternative to physical data center infrastructure, mostly to small and medium-sized businesses. That has driven the creation of a robust category of cloud migration services which has emerged as these smaller businesses have made considerable investments in moving their apps from colocation and data center environments into public clouds. 

Enterprises, however, have been notably slower to invest in public cloud and cloud migration, at least in proportion to their overall IT budgets.  There are many reasons for the slower enterprise adoption of public loud (IaaS) and they have been discussed extensively. I think what is missing is a more robust discussion of the next killer apps for the cloud; the enterprise game changers. ­­

I think the new cloud killer apps for enterprises will leverage cloud-integrated data centers (or true hybrid cloud adoption), and will strategically transform IT operating models. Those killer apps will include cloud-enabled agility, protection and scalability.

• Cloud-Integrated Agility (Strategic Agility)

VMware introduced virtualization-enabled x86 agility in devtest and then production environments as a way to increase data center and hardware efficiency and to reduce growing application/server management costs.  Perhaps their cultural influence on IT has been even more powerful than their impressive growth in revenues. They, in fact, likely set the stage for an unprecedented IT cultural revolution simply by decoupling the lock-in between OS and apps and hardware. That decoupling ultimately became the software-defined data center, and proved how agility could drive data center transformation.

VMware in recent years has perhaps had as much impact on the evolution of IT as IBM when it introduced mainframe timesharing. Yet the hybrid cloud model it delivers today is really the equivalent of a two car garage (with perhaps a Tesla and a Mercedes) rather than a single unified environment (true hybrid) environment.  With recent acquisitions, VMware is no doubt on the way to delivering a true hybrid architecture.

Recent comments, however, seem to indicate that VMware is still thinking the private cloud is a hybrid cloud; for example, see this blog by Forrester’s James Staten: VMware and the innovators dilemma.

Private cloud, however, is tactical agility. Cloud-integrated agility is the ability to run apps and services seamlessly across data centers and clouds, with enterprise-grade services and controls and without lock-in.  It is strategic agility.  Think of the cloud-integrated data center as a natural evolution of the software-defined data center.

Cloud-integrated agility is strategic agility.  It enables unprecedented pre-production AND production infrastructure flexibility with enterprise-grade services and controls.  The ability to create and tear down apps and services and move them between data centers, pre-production and production environments and multiple cloud providers or zones is a killer app. It offers the ultimate decoupling of the application and services from any specific premise or cloud. It can do for entire clouds and zones what virtualization has done for x86 servers.

DevTest Agility

The public cloud has emerged as an excellent devtest (or cloud devtest) environment, yet the hybrid cloud offers even more agility and the promise of production-grade emulation of the environment.  Apps and services can be tested in a true representation of the production environment, versus a close reproduction. They can also be more easily moved into production.

Hybrid cloud operating models will enjoy the advantage of strategic agility across pre-production and production environments, a new inflection point for IT and development productivity.

• Cloud-Integrated Protection (Continuous Protection)

Building out duplicate data center and colocation environments (for potential or even rare use) has a very weak business case, especially in comparison to investments in innovation, security or scalability. As CIOs are increasingly reporting to CFOs, traditional facility-bound disaster recovery and business continuity solutions are under increased scrutiny. The rise of the “pay as you go” cloud model has attracted new interest in leveraging the cloud for failover protection instead of maintaining and updating redundant physical infrastructures and even facilities. 

Unfortunately public cloud providers have not been adept at addressing these needs and the services that would be typically required for ensuring uptime. High profile outages, even with marquee customers, has lowered cloud availability expectations; and the inability for a customer to easily move from one zone to another has resulted in a lack of attractive DR and failover/continuity solutions in public clouds, despite the obvious economy.

Today the public cloud is not an enterprise-grade solution for continuous application protection. It is an isolated environment with limited integration with the data center and other zones/clouds. That “take it or leave it” isolation with resultant lock-in restricts the continuity potential of the public cloud.

The hybrid cloud (or cloud-integrated data center) has inherent strengths which compensate for public cloud weakness, especially in the area of the strategic agility needed to deploy duplicate infrastructures quickly in new clouds or zones and then fail-back when the primary location/site is restored.  The hybrid cloud is a superior architecture, which enables new levels of agility which enable new levels of application protection and scale.

The hybrid cloud offers “pay as you need” continuous protection -which is far more efficient than maintaining duplicate fixed infrastructures- with the services and controls of the data center. That combination is a far superior option for business continuity and disaster recovery (compared to today’s public clouds and redundant physical infrastructures).

• Cloud-Integrated Scalability (Continuous Scalability)

Cloud bursting has been one of the most discussed hybrid cloud killer apps.  Yet because it requires agility first and foremost it may be introduced after agility and protection issues are resolved.  It allows users to “own the base and rent the spike”.  I’ve heard from many insiders close to the development of highly scalable data center environments that the top innovators are using the equivalent of advanced private cloud infrastructures to simulate cloud bursting but have not yet introduced seamless scalability via cloud integration. Again, cloud integration is the natural evolution of both public and private cloud.  Being able to own predictable workloads and rent occasional loads is a far superior operating model for most companies.

Critical Hybrid Cloud Requirements

CloudVelocity CTO Anand Iyengar has started a discussion on hybrid cloud requirements at the CloudVelocity blog. 

Today there is a war being fought between Amazon AWS and the enterprise over the future direction of the IT industry.  Amazon promotes the public cloud as a destination, a primary and permanent facility for a company’s IT infrastructure; while enterprises today are mostly interested in cloud as a secondary facility used as needed, for everything from cloud devtest to cloud continuity and ultimately emerging “cloud on demand” operating models.

This war is completely unnecessary.  A cloud (zone) is not optimum as a fixed, permanent enterprise app and service delivery destination. The cloud is infinitely more compelling as an on demand resource for resilience, devtest and/or agility, while a traditional data center or colocation facility is optimum for predictable workloads, even with the added flexibility and efficiency of virtualization.

Agility will likely become the killer app for all enterprises, even those with the deepest pockets, as we experience accelerating rates of change in an increasingly service and software-driven world.  That is why hybrid cloud is generating disproportionate buzz (ahead of deployments) in the industry; it is the ultimate answer for enterprise IT.

It makes no business sense today to simply migrate an enterprise app from one fixed location to another fixed location, any more than it makes sense to build yet another data center (unless it is an accounting exercise).

While small and medium enterprises may embrace hybrid clouds predominantly for costs savings (inexpensive disaster recovery enabled by cloud, for example) larger enterprises will likely embrace hybrid clouds for agility.

That is also why cloud migration without integration is simply a dead end, even though it may be the pipe dream for at least one cloud provider.  In the short term public cloud means a wholesale move (cloud migration), akin to hiring a moving company, to get you settled into your new long term facility. That has to change.  Stay tuned.