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Contributed article by Greg Rusu, General Manager, Public Cloud, PEER 1 Hosting

The Rise of Customization and Its Effect on Hybrid Clouds

Every enterprise has different requirements when it comes to moving infrastructure into the cloud. Some embrace the cloud wholeheartedly and are more than happy to outsource every server to a third party hosting provider; meanwhile, others necessitate that part - or all - of their data remains in-house. As a result of such high demand for customization, hybrid cloud computing is quickly evolving from the hypothetical into a much more feasible cloud option and I predict that the manner in which these environments are configured will become more personalized as we move into 2013.

Hybrid cloud environments allow companies to maintain a portion of their infrastructure on dedicated hardware that is connected to cloud servers, meaning they can seamlessly scale up capacity to accommodate unforeseen demand. As a result of leveraging a hybrid cloud environment, enterprises benefit from the agility and availability of the cloud, while still maintaining data security and without investing in costly infrastructure.

However, despite the benefits of hybrid cloud environments, very few organizations have transitioned to a hybrid cloud. Only 16 percent of enterprises are leveraging some version of a hybrid cloud today. The back-end of hybrid environments has historically been extremely complex, as it is quite difficult to tie private networks and infrastructure to the public cloud while still maintaining security and data control. Plus, hybrid environments change almost everything about the cloud environment, including the hypervisor, infrastructure, performance guarantees and management tools, to name a few.

That complexity will never be completely eradicated, but the technology behind cloud computing is maturing to meet this challenge and hybrid cloud environments more and more are incorporating automation and other tools that make deployment and management simpler.

Simultaneous to this decrease in complexity, many enterprises are starting to think more in terms of the solution rather than the infrastructure, triggering a shift in how the cloud is utilized and configured. A year or two ago, most enterprises asked, "What can I do with the box I have?" Today, that is switching to, "What box do I need?" This is an important transition as it introduces hybrid environments as a tool to increase flexibility and scalability for those solutions that mandate these qualities, rather than an obstacle that enterprises must work around.

As a result, companies with specific demands are looking to hybrid cloud environments, and service providers are responding with a proliferation of interactivity and options in their hosting platforms. A great example of this is the drop we've seen in the time it takes to provision a server. Now, virtual servers are essentially available on-demand, requiring just minutes to get up and running. This opens up a number of possibilities for enterprises that don't have the demand or data levels to mandate a cloud environment but, on occasion, still need the extra compute power - during the holidays or for a special project, for instance.

As a result of this growing level of customization, we will see more and more companies molding their infrastructure around their solutions in 2013 and beyond, spurring innovation throughout the cloud. By understanding how various components of the cloud can be assembled in different ways, any enterprise can open up opportunities for success without having to bend over backwards to fit pre-determined configurations.

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