Data regulation in different jurisdictions is driving the adoption of hybrid cloud by enterprises.
So said Karl Campbell, VP for the UK and Southern Africa at Riverbed Technology, in a recent interview with ITWeb. "Companies want to consume cloud services, be it Office 365, SharePoint, Salesforce, etc," said Campbell.
"However, quite often, the data that resides within those cloud applications is regulated within a given territory. The only way organisations can deal with that is to separate the data from the application. You either need to put the data into an existing application or put it into the hybrid cloud data centre."
According to Gartner, nearly three-quarters of large enterprises globally expect to have hybrid deployments by the end of 2015.
"Just about every jurisdiction has some form of data regulation laws that require certain classification of data and certain types of data to reside within its geographical boundaries," Campbell said.
He cited laws like the Protection and Personal Information Act in SA, the EU General Data Protection Regulation and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards as some of the regulations forcing enterprises to consider hybrid cloud.
"Hybrid cloud is when both private and public clouds are used by an organisation to deliver applications and store data.
"The hybrid enterprise refers to an organisation that uses a mix of on-premises and cloud/software-as-a-service apps. The data and applications are located in a combination of data centres, branch offices and the cloud."
In reference to recent Gartner study, he pointed out that enterprises today operate in a hybrid environment, with 51% of the surveyed enterprises running workloads in the cloud through hybrid cloud or hosting.
"There is no large enterprise today that does not have some form of hybrid cloud because almost all companies consume some services off the Internet."
According to the study, he noted, most organisations have a hybrid network, as 55% of companies use an Internet connection in place of a traditional WAN link, and 84% permit the use of personal devices in the office.
Nonetheless, he said, despite the increased importance and focus on apps, companies continue to struggle with managing application performance.
"At any point in time, three-quarters of companies suffer from degraded app performance and more than two-thirds are reactive and only learn about the issue from end-users. One-third take more than one month, or never, solve the problem."
He believes enterprises must transform application performance into a competitive advantage by maximising employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility.
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