Building a Private Cloud Strategy that Enables a Smart Hybrid Cloud Solution
For the last year, the cloud conversation has switched from that of private vs. public to focus on the far more useful hybrid cloud strategy. The challenge for vendors and IT customers alike lies in establishing the benefits of hybrid cloud services in the context of a company’s specific business environment and building a cloud strategy that offers the best flexibility and cost savings in the long run.
Extending cloud-usage to a hybrid model can mean many things, from simply finding ways of managing the existing use of public cloud services to developing a fully automated environment where workloads can seamlessly flow between public and private cloud environments while maintaining the security, SLA and cost controls that each customer deems fit. Ultimately, the goal of any cloud solution should focus on supplying high-level services--at infrastructure-, platform-, and application-level--that are seamlessly available from either public or private cloud sources as best fit a customer’s cost, performance, security, data sovereignty and compliance requirements.
The cloud is still very much a work in progress, and in spite of optimistic cloud adoption rates there are still many customers who balk at the initial cost and complexity required to adopt hybrid cloud in their existing enterprise infrastructures. In this program we will examine how hybrid works now, how it doesn’t, and what both cloud customers and vendors should be thinking about as they look to the future.
Presented by
Steven Hill,
Senior Analyst, Data Center Solutions
Steven is responsible for covering the emerging technologies that are remapping the traditional data center landscape. These include software and hardware products that are needed to support public and private cloud infrastructures, as well as the underlying virtualization and orchestration technology required to enable process automation and workload management. He also covers the Converged Infrastructure market, with a focus on the latest generations of vendor pre-certified and optimized hardware/software stacks.
For a decade prior to joining Current Analysis, Steven was an independent speaker, writer and analyst on data center technologies as well as serving as the Technology Editor of Storage and Servers for Network Computing Magazine. He has authored numerous articles on enterprise-class computing systems and spoken throughout the United States as an early advocate of server virtualization and network convergence technologies. Prior to that he spent 12 years serving a number of technologist roles as an imaging systems administrator and departmental manager for a Fortune-500 retail corporation.