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Why Choose Cloud or On-Premise? Hybrid is Here
Contributed
Article by Steve Workman, VP Product Management, LANDesk Software
Well folks, 2012 is here and twelve years
into the twenty first century, I think it's about time we had a more flexible
cloud computing model. While hybrid cloud has been around for several years, I
believe the majority of enterprises will adopt a hybrid cloud model next year.
Given the wide range of enterprise IT environments
around the world, there is no one software management / delivery model to fit
all. In addition, IT administrators are demanding flexible
solutions that enable them to define how they provide support capabilities to
end users and end users are demanding more choices in how they access data.
Given this myriad of variables, it seems we've reached the tipping point of
finally moving away from a one-size-fits-all delivery model.
With a hybrid cloud approach, IT organizations can take
advantage of the flexibility provided by cloud for less sensitive or
commoditized applications, while hosting more sensitive applications
on-premise. It's the best of both worlds. And while I don't think any IT
technicians or technology vendors (minus the pure cloud vendors, of course)
were ever advocating an all cloud or an all on-premise approach, it seems we
are finally figuring out the ideal level of each, after years of tinkering.
Hybrid cloud just makes sense. In his case for the hybrid
cloud approach David
Linthicum of InfoWorld writes
"The use of hybrid computing acknowledges and validates the fact that not all
IT resources should exist in public clouds today -- and some may never exist in
public clouds. Considering compliance issues, performance requirements, and
security restrictions, the need for local is a fact of life. This experience
with the hybrid model helps us all get better at understanding what compute
cycles and data have to be kept local and what can be processed remotely."
Indeed it seems more and more enterprises are steering away
from putting all their chips in the cloud. The
Amazon EC2 outage and similar issues throughout the past year are turning a
number of once cloud-happy enterprises off to this approach. And who could
blame them, especially given Amazon's lack of communication? No one should have
their entire infrastructure in the hands of a third party (especially a
non-communicative one). I believe this is true for any business but of course,
the level of on-premise requirements and in turn, applications that can easily
be hosted in the cloud vary based on the type of business.
A financial institution or healthcare provider may be wary
of hosting anything in the cloud, whereas a company without a large amount of
customer data or other sensitive information on file may be alright with taking
everything to the cloud. If this is the case, the finance/healthcare provider
will not realize the cost savings or flexible user computing model inherent in
the cloud. And the pure-cloud company could lose access to its data (in the
event of Amazon 2.0) or its data altogether (in the event of a major breach).
My hope for this coming year is that neither of these scenarios becomes a
reality, as I believe most enterprises will finally realize that the hybrid
cloud is here.
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About the Author
As Vice President of Product Management at
LANDesk Software, Steve Workman drives the roadmap and requirements for all
LANDesk product lines. Workman has over 15 years experience in product
management and strategic product direction.