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Hybrid Cloud growing in popularity: BMC

Hybrid Cloud growing in popularity: BMC

Recent BMC research also shows the Cloud is causing growing tensions between CIOs and the business

Hyrbrid Clouds are set to overtake public or private Clouds as the preferred method of deployment among CIOs around the world.

According to BMC Software CIO, Mark Settle, hybrid Clouds were attractive for CIOs as many IT departments did not have the luxury of being able to jump straight into building their own private Cloud capabilities.

"Very few organisations have the financial deep pockets to go out and build a capability and wait for the users to come,” he said.

“What a lot of CIOs are doing is they are trying to identify preliminary use cases. A classic use case for a third-party Cloud would be the development of a new Web application where you want to do some prototyping at a small scale and then have the ability to rapidly scale the application if it actually has traction in the marketplace. Another is to take snapshots of development environments or to do backups in Cloud-type environments.”

As a result, hybrid Cloud deployments -- running on a combination of internal and external infrastructure -- were increasingly being used as a starting point and a happy medium between the public and private Clouds.

“It’s universally recognised in the industry that hybrid Cloud management is going to be a core competency of the successful IT shop or company in the 2015 time frame,” Settle said. “People that keep trying to do everything on their own inside the firewall are going to pay a penalty from both a cost and agility perspective," Settle said.

"Companies that want to be able to leap at opportunities around leveraging mobile applications and can protect themselves from an information security point of view are really going to become adapted, they’re going to use third-party resources to accelerate time to market and new capabilities.

“If you really believe that businesses are moving onto the Web and the Web is moving onto global devices [then] you’ve got to have agility that can’t be provided by the conventional model of ‘we own everything, we operate everything and we control everything inside the firewall’. This hybrid Cloud computing capability, its competency is really going to be a critical success skill for IT shops and commercial businesses going forward.”

The comments follow the release of recent research by BMC which found that the ability for the business to use the Cloud to bypass the IT department is causing growing tensions between CIOs and business executives.

The survey, Delivering on High Cloud Expectations, comprised of 327 in-depth responses from enterprise infrastructure executives and architects across the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific, found that 39 per cent of respondents have five or more virtual server pools, with complexity being the top issue to tackle to reduce costs.

Further, 71 per cent believe IT operations should ensure public Cloud services meet the performance, security and availability needs of the business, but 61 per cent agreed that providing the same level of management across public and private Cloud services would be difficult.

As those surveyed want to reduce complexity and costs, 81 per cent of respondents indicated that a comprehensive Cloud strategy is a high priority for the coming year.

The survey also found that 72 per cent of respondents think that the Cloud is a way for business executives to be more independent from IT, making it increasingly concerning for CIOs that their simplification and cost reduction strategies may be bypassed.

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