Hybrid cloud computing gains momentum

By Lee Hyung-bae

The cloud discussion, percolating through the IT industry for a good seven years, now shows every sign of going to a full boil.

The reason is simple: it is not just IT people who might want cloud computing. Business people now crave what the cloud can bring ― agility, efficiency and innovation.

In a world in which your newest competitor was born in the cloud, it is nice to have access to the same weaponry.

But there is a lot more to IT than the shiny bits that run in a public cloud. There are already core applications that power the business, and starting over in a public cloud is not always an option.

More important, consider the vast databases of sensitive and valuable information that are entrusted to IT departments for safekeeping. Pushing all of that out to a public cloud is not an option in so many cases.

The need is great for IT services that offer the speed and agility of the public cloud but also interact easily with existing enterprise applications and an safely house data behind the corporate firewall.

The industry has responded with a plethora of private clouds that try to do this, with varying degrees of success.

All the industry surveys show the same thing: most organizations see themselves using a combination of public and private cloud resources for the foreseeable future. But will they work together?

The problem is that most public and private clouds are inherently dissimilar. They are built on different technologies. They are paid for, operated, consumed, and supported differently. They behave differently. No matter what aspect you consider, it is the differences you notice, not the similarities.

Every part of the stack ― infrastructure, network, middleware, applications, security, monitoring, and so on ― requires specialized glue and adapters.

Almost nothing between most public and private clouds works out of the box.

And anything that is custom built has to be maintained indefinitely, which unfortunately defeats a major reason for moving to cloud in the first place.

Complexity is the enemy of efficiency in the world of IT, and the industry has inadvertently left its customers with a tremendously difficult problem to manage as they move to cloud architectures.

Most public cloud vendors cannot offer their customers a compatible private cloud option. And most private cloud vendors cannot offer a compatible public option.

You can buy each, but making them work together is up to you, the customer. And the sort of corner into which we have painted ourselves is now starting to become apparent.

Having watched the industry try to promote and drive new technologies over many years, we know that school is always in session ― every day there is something new to be learned.

We solve today’s problems and immediately learn about new ones.

The lesson we are learning today is that we need to think of enterprise cloud computing as an interoperable, manageable whole, in the aspects of enterprise networks, enterprise applications, and enterprise messaging.

Public clouds without compatible private cloud options will be of limited use to most enterprises. The same option will be applied for private clouds without compatible public cloud options.

The writer is sales vice president of Oracle Korea.