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VMware’s hybrid cloud – a discussion with customers

Summary: Hybrid cloud gets a lot of press and VMware are claiming a stake in a market predicted to grow massively over the next few years. I discuss with customers what vCloud Air can offer businesses and what you need to consider.

On Tuesday 25th November I took part in an online discussion about the hybrid cloud with a couple of vCloud Air customers (Schalk van der Merwe from The Hut Group and Matthew Garrett from Cloud Business) along with VMware’s Rick Munro (Chief Technologist, vCloud, EMEA), and well known blogger Julian Wood. The discussion lasted around an hour and we discussed topics such as;

  • Is hybrid cloud just a stepping stone to the public cloud?
  • Is data sovereignty an issue for customers?
  • Are clouds converging to a global platform or diverging into niches (market verticals like healthcare, government etc)?
  • Is the rapid pace of change a challenge when making a business case for cloud?
  • Does adopting cloud lead to changes in established ways of doing business, from a people/process/technology perspective?

You can view an edited version our discussion below which (luckily for you dear http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/flomax/ reader) is only 18 minutes;

https://youtube.com/watch?v=R3JvRw61UQA

If you don’t have time to watch, some of my takeaways were;

  • agility is a key driver of cloud adoption, more so than cost savings (which in my experience aren’t always expected or delivered). Results speak louder than RFPs!
  • it’s not a case of ‘private’ OR ‘public’ OR ‘hybrid’ cloud – you can, and probably should, use all three depending on your use case
  • start small and build on success (just as the DevOps crowd advocate!).
  • hybrid cloud may be a stepping stone, but it’s essential to take a first step
  • vCloud leverages your existing knowledge and skills so is an easy first step

Personally I think hybrid cloud is here to stay. Mainframes are still with us (from the 1950’s) and email has been available as a SaaS offering for at least 18 years (Hotmail started in 1996) yet today there are still thousands of companies running their own email systems.  For many enterprises ‘hybrid cloud’ will actually mean a multitude of different clouds including vCloud Air, AWS etc, despite the additional management overheads that will introduce. Time will tell!