thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz

Public-, Private-, Hybrid Cloud – Quo Vadis?

Back in 2012 thought leader Esteban Kolsky went through the efforts of defining a pure, open cloud architecture with its three constituting layers: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, and samples of their interactions. A core focus lies on how an open cloud model solves the issues of security, scalability, and integration. Esteban also makes it abundantly clear that it can easily take 10 to 15 years to be widely adopted. First things first: He is right – at least to quite an extent. Personally I am of the opinion that any open cloud model necessarily includes private, and thus hybrid clouds. I say this while I agree that the panacea is the open model. Private and hybrid models are at least challenged in the security aspect and, to a lesser extent, in the integration challenge with the latter usually being mitigated by maintaining a white list of ‘approved’ applications, technologies, vendors, etc. Scalability shouldn’t be an issue for most companies, given that they work with a data center provider that is worth their salt. The bigger problem of security remains, but here one could argue that it is the same as for non-cloud, on-premise implementations. To a minimum, private and hybrid clouds have their value as transition steps. In reality it is more. Just take VW implementing a private cloud based upon OpenStack, delivered by Mirantis – which are, interestingly enough, not covered by Forrester Research in their Q1 2016 Wave on Private Cloud Software Suites. But I deviate … Cloud Adoption The recent RightScale report on the State of the Cloud tells us that nearly every company uses cloud...