Hybrid cloud adoption by South African enterprises is lagging.
That's the view expressed by Karl Campbell, regional vice-president for the UK and SA at Riverbed Technology; and Jonathan Clarke, senior manager for systems engineers, pre-sales at EMC Southern Africa.
"South Africa is definitely still in the early stages of adopting the hybrid enterprise model," says Campbell.
Clarke points out SA's adoption of hybrid cloud is slow compared to the US and Europe, and even emerging markets such as Kenya and Nigeria.
"Interest in hybrid cloud is high, but South African companies still have concerns about issues such as security and migration costs," Clarke says.
In a recent cloud computing survey conducted by ITWeb, in partnership with VMware, private cloud emerged as the top cloud model being used by local organisations at 34%, hybrid came in second at 29% and public cloud came in at third at 16%.
Market analyst firm Research and Markets forecasts the global hybrid cloud market will grow at a CAGR of 30.16% over the period 2013 to 2018. The report, the Global Hybrid Cloud Market 2014-2018, was prepared based on market analysis from industry experts and covers the Americas and the EMEA and APAC regions. The report also includes information about the key vendors operating in this market, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, RackSpace and VMware.
Campbell and Clarke believe a hybrid cloud solution provides answers to the cloud challenges most organisations are faced with today.
"Even though the cloud has brought many benefits to businesses - providing access to data when and where users want, the ability to sync mobile devices and the ability to collaborate in real-time, it has also created new challenges for business leaders," says Campbell.
"It's impossible to put every application in the cloud, nor would you want to - budget constraints, technical limitations, security concerns, performance issues can all be valid barriers to doing so. This is where the hybrid enterprise fits in," he adds.
The hybrid enterprise uses a mix of data centre with private and public cloud-hosted apps, data, as well as networks made up of high-quality and expensive VPNs, point-to-point circuits, and supplemented by Internet connectivity, he explains.
Clarke concurs: "The hybrid cloud is the perfect solution because it gives companies the advantages of private cloud for the solutions where required, and the agility of public cloud where this is required.
"Companies can maintain the trust, visibility and reliability of private clouds, and still capture the speed, simplicity and flexibility of public clouds. The key to hybrid success is agility. Some applications are ideal for off-premises clouds, especially those with 'bursty' workloads; some are better in-house; and some change from one to the other," he adds.
Clarke notes a well-run hybrid cloud enables companies to provision and move applications between clouds as required, without having to invest in infrastructure required to meet peak demand.
All organisations, both large and small, can benefit from hybrid cloud, Clarke states. "A hybrid cloud gives companies the best of both worlds; they can invest in the infrastructure needed for those systems critical to the company and must be kept in house, and use a public cloud for the systems that are not core to their business or where they need agility," he concludes.
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