Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud Computing: There can only be One

‘There can only be one’, said Scott Sanchez, Lead Cloud Evangelist at Rackspace, invoking the cult fantasy film The Highlander, when explaining the direction of cloud computing.  Sanchez notes that while there are many cloud vendor brands, creating a landscape of differing cloud platforms and capabilities is ultimately counter-productive.  Sanchez said that “when you look at how to build a Cloud strategy, you should just have one Cloud strategy.”  Sanchez is a proponent for the creation of cloud standards, like OpenStack.

Kerry Bailey, HP senior VP of sales, said that “the first phase that enterprise did was a bit of lifting and shifting of existing workloads… These customers are looking at cloud and saying ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next two years.”   Developers are now writing applications that take advantage of the cloud infrastructure.  Bailey argues that these businesses can ensure an easier future migration path either to or from both public and in-house data centers by basing their development on an open-source platform like OpenStack.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical Ltd., said that the “hybrid cloud is central to the conversation about cloud computing.  Some large organizations are native to the cloud or moved all of their computing to the cloud, but they are rare.  Most companies are committed to public and private clouds, and getting data to the right cloud. Hybrid cloud is without a doubt central to the conversation and thought about the cloud.”

Wide acceptance of standards like OpenStack would allow more fluid movement by businesses of their data to and from public and private clouds.  More than 50 percent of large businesses are expected to have hybrid cloud deployments by 2017 according to Gartner.  Reasons for why the hybrid cloud is appealing to businesses include:

• Data security can be more easily controlled by classifying which data and which applications are sensitive or which need to comply with strict government regulations.  Sensitive data can remain within the firewall while less sensitive data can be moved to a public cloud.
• Hybrid architectures mean that businesses can tap into public cloud infrastructure when demand peaks and exceeds what private clouds can deliver.
• Hybrid clouds also allow businesses to score some of the much-hyped cost-saving benefits of the public cloud.