3 Reasons Why Hybrid Cloud is the Way to Go!

- Bill Fathers, Executive VP and GM, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware

Just as phone is now synonymous to smartphones, the term cloud will also mean hybrid clouds. Here's why...

I think it’s fair to characterize the last five or so years as an experiment in the merit and feasibility of cloud-based enterprise IT. To be sure, the notion of taking corporate workloads and data off-prem was hardly a guaranteed sell at the outset, but with the explosion and rising ubiquity of XaaS, it’s starting to look like cloud is not only here to stay, but has entered the professional era.

As far as enterprise is concerned, the term “cloud,” will refer increasingly to the hybrid cloud—just as “smartphone” simply became “phone.” What’s driving this expedited rate of adoption, and the standardization of the hybrid use case? As with most paradigm shifts, a confluence of factors is responsible.

Reason 1: Public-only cloud is not enough for any organization
For many organizations, public was the first foray into cloud services. And when it comes to accessibility, public cloud has obvious advantages, but its shortcomings are equally apparent in issues like regulatory compliance and data security.

The utility of a hybrid approach is, therefore, fairly obvious: some data and workloads simply need to reside onsite. But when proximity isn’t a concern, you should have the ability to extend into the public cloud, where storage and compute is both cheaper and more accessible.

Reason 2: The cloud is becoming cheaper
Cloud services are economical compared to their local counterparts, and cost savings will only increase. Tasks like DR as a service have traditionally been expensive, but with widespread adoption of virtualization and software-defined frameworks, these services are increasingly becoming available to a much broader demographic.

“The utility of a hybrid approach
is that some data and workloads simply need to reside on-site.”
Also driving the reduction in cost is the shift away from homogenous, single vendor datacenters. With increased competition, end-user pricing will invariably go down and services will become even more affordable.

- Bill Fathers, Executive VP and GM, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware

Reason 3: Software-defined data centers are becoming ubiquitous…and it’s all about the network
The emergence of the software-defined data center is perhaps the most exciting development driving hybrid cloud adoption. In some ways, a software-defined data center is not a very radical departure. It’s essentially a continuation of the same abstraction we’ve already observed inside the data center, with the storage and compute silos leading the charge and networking now moving into the logical layer too.

Virtual networking is the connective fabric that ties together on-premise and off-premise resources into a single, cohesive entity. This doesn’t just allow us to streamline things like management and orchestration—it allows us to bring a still untouched class of apps to the cloud seamlessly and securely.

To date, the cloud has mostly been about end-user applications, but thanks to virtual networking platforms like NSX, systems of record can now live in the cloud too. Web commerce apps, ERP systems and email platforms all require a great deal of network layer integration between the public and private clouds and this had previously been a great challenge.

NSX is helping to address this final bottleneck, empowering enterprises to wholeheartedly embrace a true hybrid cloud strategy, and in turn bringing hybrid cloud into the professional era.

We’ve already been using the principal components of hybrid cloud for several years. It’s now simply a matter of leveraging them in tandem through virtualized network platforms.