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Hybrid cloud makes sense for CIOs

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 13 Oct 2014
Hybrid cloud is the best platform for provisioning an ever-changing mix of internal and external services, says Servaas Venter, country manager at EMC Southern Africa.
Hybrid cloud is the best platform for provisioning an ever-changing mix of internal and external services, says Servaas Venter, country manager at EMC Southern Africa.

Understanding and capitalising on hybrid cloud are priorities for today's CIOs.

That's according to Servaas Venter, country manager at EMC Southern Africa, who explains because it incorporates public and private clouds, a hybrid cloud brings together the best of both worlds by enabling businesses and their IT organisations unprecedented flexibility where they host their many and varied workloads.

Market analyst firm Gartner believes almost 50% of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

It says in the past three years, private cloud computing has moved from an aspiration to a tentative reality for many large enterprises. Hybrid cloud computing is at the same place today as private cloud was three years ago: actual deployments are low, but aspirations are high, according to Gartner.

Venter notes hybrid cloud provides the flexibility to use a variety of services; the scalability to keep pace with business volume; the efficiency to keep costs to a minimum; and the ability to protect data and other technology assets.

"The main business driver is the imperative to participate effectively in a highly mobile, networked and data-intensive marketplace," he says.

With IT-as-a-service (ITAAS), the outputs of IT visible to and consumed by the business are structured as clearly defined and easily managed services, says Venter, adding examples include everything from processing customer orders to on-boarding new employees to backup and recovery of business applications.

"Hybrid cloud is the best platform for provisioning an ever-changing mix of internal and external services. It delivers flexibility in sourcing services, scalability to adjust to changing business demand, the customer experience of a browser-type interface, and the transparency into usage that's essential for managing consumption and automated billing. It's the best fit for ITAAS."

He also notes hybrid cloud gives IT much greater flexibility to determine where to run individual workloads including applications and services - in-house, with service providers, or in the public cloud. That, in turn, makes it much easier to 're-platform' applications by migrating them to more current and robust technology.

Hybrid cloud also provides IT with a richer set of automated monitoring and management tools for a better integrated computing environment, Venter explains, noting with mundane tasks automated and management simplified, IT is better able to control and optimise the platform while improving infrastructure performance and cost.

"Given those realities, enterprises need more attentive and adaptive approaches to security. Hybrid cloud is an important part of the solution, it enables enterprises to leverage public cloud services while maintaining the trust of their customers and ensuring consistent enforcement of security policies and compliance with regulations," he concludes.

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