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Contributed Article By Greg Arnette, founder and CTO of Sonian 

2010, The Year of Hybrid IT 

2010 is the year "Hybrid IT" will help enterprises harness cloud computing. Hybrid IT is a new paradigm for IT management, enabling organizations to benefit from cloud computing's low cost, infinite storage and powerful and flexible CPU platforms. All these positive capabilities are accessible while still preserving the idea of maintaining control of data as if it were stored on-premises. Hybrid IT is a "win/win" scenario for the IT manager and the chief financial officer.

From small to mid-size enterprises (SMEs) to the Fortune 1000, organizations will move parts of their IT infrastructure to the Cloud.  For the SMEs, Cloud-powered hybrid IT will level the playing field by enabling organizations to adopt strategic hierarchical storage management (HSM) and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) features without breaking the IT budget. For larger enterprises, Hybrid IT will introduce new cost savings by allowing them to allocate portions of their storage environments to the cloud and eliminate the hardware, software and management costs previously associated with keeping those activities on site. 

New software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications built specifically for the Cloud will act essentially as an extension of the customer's own data center. These Cloud-powered SaaS services enable organizations to strategically and tactically meld cloud-powered SaaS functions with on-premise servers.

As a result, organizations will leverage the Cloud's on-demand CPU to power through terabytes of content for large searches or deep analytics. With better business intelligence culled from employee generated content silos across the organization, businesses will unlock the previously inaccessible value of their data and gain new insights into their customers and their operations. Cloud-powered archiving will help organizations focus on long-term growth initiatives.

Hybrid IT is ushering in a new wave of computing that will be as profound as the change from mainframes to minicomputers or client-server to the web. Leveraging the cloud requires new software development skills and technology frameworks in order to build SaaS applications on a radically different stack as well as new IT management skills for the individuals who use these applications.  The payoff for end users will be enormous. 

About the Author

Greg Arnette is the founder and CTO of Sonian. The trusted cloud-powered universal data management company, Sonian delivers archiving/storage, e-discovery and compliance services. Sonian's mission is to archive the world's electronic communications and files and make them universally accessible and useful via its powerful universal data management service which is secure, reliable and affordable.