What is the Hybrid Cloud?

Managing a hybrid cloud

For CIOs, the rapid development of the cloud as a core service continues to impact upon more aspects of their businesses. Indeed, according to the CIO Survey from KPMG: “This year’s CIO Survey reveals that the scope of cloud, and its range of application areas, continues to grow, and there is no indication that it will stop with 88% of organisations feeling more confident about their use of cloud technologies than at any point in the last three years.”

Also, time seems to be of the essence when it comes to designing and deploying to a hybrid cloud, as Nikos Terizakis, UK Consulting Practice Manager, HeleCloud explained: “Digitalisation has become a personal mission for many CEOs as it means opportunities for greater efficiency, productivity and revenue growth. But it’s crunch time.”

Terizakis concluded: “Success requires CIOs to be able to make key decisions about placing the right environment on the right cloud platform as well as guide the whole company – including his team – through this significant paradigm shift. This has a major impact on the role of the CIO and major implication for skills, team structure, operational focus, the pace of technology adoption. The ability to enable new business capability and services changes significantly and the CIO now plays a central role in that.”

How fast will change need to place? “The shift to the cloud until the end of 2022 represents a critical period for traditional infrastructure providers, as competitors benefit from increasing cloud-driven disruption and spending triggers based on infrastructure asset expiration,” said Michael Warrilow, Research Vice President, Gartner. “As the cloud becomes increasingly mainstream, it will influence even greater portions of enterprise IT decisions, particularly in system infrastructure as increasing tension becomes apparent between on- and off-premises solutions.”

Business, as they develop their medium to long term development strategies, are increasingly placing cloud services at their centre. Indeed, according to IDC, spending on cloud infrastructure will see a 13% annual growth to 2022 hitting $88 billion or nearly 57% of the total IT spend over the period.

Ultimately the hybrid cloud will become the default to building efficient, secure and agile networks. The public, private cloud will move increasingly together, but will always have a degree of separation to support full compliance within specific industries. The future of IT infrastructure is bespoke deployments that leverage the cloud to deliver innovation across all business sectors.

NEXT: Silicon in Focus – interview with Dave Locke, Field CTO EMEA at WWT