ebook hybrid cloud

Sasha Gilenson

[Pick the date]

HYBRID CLOUD FROM THE EXPERTS

See how experts and industry analysts share their insights into the promise that hybrid cloud offers today's enterprise. Are the individual entities of public and private clouds too rigid for needs of today's enterprise? There are strong arguments for both sides of the different cloud options. The public cloud offers flexible capacity for changing demand. Yet is the public cloud as secure for data as on-premise options? Can mission-critical data be safely moved off-premises? And how will disaster recovery be maintained? According to the experts, most enterprises will eventually end up with hybrid cloud environments. But that's easier said than done. Hybrid IT is the new IT and appears here to stay. While the cloud market matures, IT organizations will be adopting a hybrid IT strategy that not only builds internal clouds to house critical IT services and compete with public clouds, but also utilizes the external cloud to house noncritical IT services and data, augment internal capacity, and increase IT agility.

A publication of

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Download+the+evolven+eBook+Hybrid+Cloud++goo.gl/LKMQt�

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://www.evolven.com/download-ebook-hybrid-cloud.html�

http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://www.evolven.com/download-ebook-hybrid-cloud.html�

HYBRID CLOUD INSIGHTS FROM THE EXPERTS

2 w w w . e v o l v e n . c o m S h a r e t h i s e B o o k !

Free Trial

This eBook is presented to you by Evolven

Evolven. Configuration and Change Management for the Modern Data Center and Cloud. Evolven's designed from the ground up to deal with the dynamics and complexity of the modern data center and cloud environments.

Dynamically crawls and collects comprehensive environment configuration information

Gives you a consolidated view of your entire application stack

Captures and analyzes changes in configuration parameters down to the most granular level

Applies analytics to deliver actionable information

More: See our website to see Evolven in action

http://www.evolven.com/?utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=pdf&utm_campaign=it%2Bspending�




http://www.evolven.com/sign-up.html?utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=pdf&utm_campaign=it%2Bspending�



C ontents

Mind the Gap: Here Comes Hybrid Cloud ..................................... 4

Why a Hybrid Approach to Cloud Computing Works Best for Now ...................................................................................................... 6

Hybrid cloud: Extend Your Private Cloud With Public Cloud Services ........................................................................................ 9

The Hybrid Cloud: What Is It, and How Do You Get There? ....... 11

The Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds ............................... 14

Why You Should Consider Hybrid Cloud Computing For Your Business ...................................................................................... 18

Hybrid Cloud model: Challenges and Opportunities ................... 20

Hybrid Cloud: Harsh Reality And New Challenges ..................... 23







Mind the Gap: Here Comes Hybrid Cloud By Thomas J. Bittman, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner

There’s Just when you thought you were starting to understand cloud computing, and private cloud computing, here comes hybrid cloud!

Vendors are already flocking to the term – it means everything from remotely managed appliances to a mix of virtual and non-virtual servers to traditional applications using cloud services, and everything in between. So what is it?

Gartner defines a hybrid cloud service as a cloud computing service that is composed of some combination of private, public and community cloud services, from different service providers. A hybrid cloud service crosses isolation and provider boundaries so that it can’t be simply put in one category of private, public, or community cloud service. This definition is intentionally loose, because there really are a lot of interesting edge exceptions, and rather than draw a tight boundary around what is, and what isn’t, this seems to get to the central point of the matter well enough.

So why is hybrid cloud computing useful? It allows you to extend either the capacity or the capability of a cloud service, by aggregation, integration or customization with another cloud service. For example, there might be a community cloud service that needs to include data from public cloud services in its analysis – while retaining a certain amount of analytics or data privately. Or a private cloud service that needs to expand its capacity by extending temporarily into a public cloud service (or perhaps a somewhat private cloud service offered by a third party provider). It allows you to balance your privacy needs with additional capacity and capability needs.

The terms “overdrafting” and “cloudbursting” have been used to describe how a hybrid cloud service could be used for capacity, but they paint an extreme example. Hybrid cloud compositions can be static (designed to require multiple services), composed at deployment/usage time (e.g., perhaps choosing one service provider or another, or combining based on policies), or composed dynamically (e.g., cloudbursting – or perhaps at disaster recovery time).

While these compositions can be designed into services and/or cloud-based applications, they will often be managed by cloud services brokerages – the intermediary that Gartner expects to become a major phenom in the next few years (something like the system integrator of the cloud world). Large enterprises will often take on this role themselves – in fact, this is central to Gartner’s vision for the future of IT.

So what does all this mean now? It means look out – the world is not going to be neatly divided into separate private and public cloud services. To maximize efficiency and take advantage of publicly available cloud services, we’re going to munge them together. Private clouds, in particular, will not stay simply “private” for long – Gartner expects most private cloud services to become hybrid. Minding the gap is key – planning for it, balancing isolation and value, leveraging it – hybrid will move from the realm of hype and vendor cloud-washing to reality in the next few years.







Published: http://blogs.gartner.com/thomas_bittman/2012/09/24/mind-the-gap-here-comes-hybrid-cloud/

About T homas J . B ittman Thomas Bittman is a vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner Research. Mr. Bittman has led the industry in areas such as cloud computing and virtualization. Mr. Bittman was an early pioneer for the concept of private cloud computing, and invented the term "real-time infrastructure," which has been adopted by major vendors and many enterprises as their infrastructure direction. He has served as Gartner's lead analyst covering IBM and Microsoft, and he served for three years as a member of Gartner's Senior Research Board. In 2005, he earned Gartner's Analyst of the Year Award.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/thomas-bittman/11/26/b39 https://twitter.com/tombitt





http://blogs.gartner.com/thomas_bittman/2012/09/24/mind-the-gap-here-comes-hybrid-cloud/�

http://www.gartner.com/AnalystBiography?authorId=7030�

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/thomas-bittman/11/26/b39�

https://twitter.com/tombitt�



Why a Hybrid Approach to Cloud Computing Works Best for Now By Joe McKendrick, Contributor, Forbes.com

Call it one of the most expensive insurance policies in the world. Companies have spent billions of dollars over the years building and maintaining backup disk arrays and secondary data centers to keep things running in the event that something goes wrong.

Cloud turns backup and recovery on its head, making it possible to provision back-up sites as needed, for pennies. Ironically, however, this goes against the gut instincts of many IT executives, who spend a lot of time worrying about data security and availability.

Goodbye to a lot of that? Hybrid cloud provides a failsafe approach without the need for a secondary backup site. Photo: Wikipedia

That’s the view of David Nichols, principal and Americas CIO services leader for Ernst & Young IT Advisory Services, who has been working closely with companies across the globe to identify cloud opportunities. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Nichols to get his take on the pluses and minuses of cloud computing, and he observed the approach is still in its early stages.

While “there is a lot of demand for cloud,” he confirms, most companies do not yet have a formal strategy or end-goal. That’s because most companies have not reached the point where at least 30% of their workloads are carried in the cloud, he says. Once an organization passes that 30% threshold, cloud starts to become a serious part of the business.

And Nichols has heard a lot of arguments from both sides lately about the viability of cloud – the cloud not as secure as on-premises systems for data; the cloud is more secure than on-premises systems for data. On one side, he hears: “’There’s no way I can move mission-critical data off-premises. I can’t allow stuff to not be within my four walls, how do we do disaster recovery, how do I make sure this stuff is restored?’”

Still, he relates, other executives say they favor the cloud precisely because it is more secure. “Another CIO told me that was exactly the reason he moved some of his stuff to the cloud. As he put it: ‘If all they do is data storage, they’re going do it better than my people do it. That’s all they do, every day. When your transmission breaks, are you going to take it to a generalist, or are you going to take it to a transmission specialist? Plus, cloud providers will have better procedures, more sophisticated and better data recovery procedures and more sophisticated firewalls.’”

Perhaps the best approach is to have the best of both worlds. Nichols says a hybrid cloud strategy, which incorporates both off-site and off-site services, provides a “failsafe” model for enterprises. “Maybe there are some things you can do in the cloud model, and some things that you can’t because maybe you don’t feel as secure. But the cloud could be one more failsafe. Maybe you can get one or two or three more ’9s’ from a recovery perspective that you couldn’t have gotten otherwise. Maybe this is a







cheaper way to get there than it was to have to buy all the stuff and house yourself. And that’s just on the data storage side.”

By relying on the cloud for backup, it “provides one more failsafe approach, instead of having to buy a sophisticated server and RAID platform,” Nichols points out. “Its a pretty cheap solution to back it up in the cloud someplace, and therefore know you’ll always have it in case something goes wrong.”

There are even rumblings from many IT executives that the cloud backup is quicker than the primary backup. There are cases in which cloud could function as the primary backup site, with on-premises backup as the failover environment.

The “hybrid” approach Nichols alludes to may be more common within many enterprises than all-cloud environment, he predicts. For the most part, cloud is still an under-the-radar phenomenon, and companies have not developed formal cloud strategies. “They’re not really sure what is the biggest impact,” Nichols says. “They’re not really sure how to go about it. Is this a cost-reduction exercise? Can we really use it to drive the business? Or is this only going to help us drive certain aspects of our corporate strategy, but not really moving the needle on our ongoing business?

Until cloud workloads surpass that 30% mark in organizations, cloud will “remain hidden within operating models within IT organizations,” he points out. In the long run, he predicts, cloud penetration within enterprises will reach 70%. As organizations move between the 30% and 70% points, expect to see widespread adoption of hybrid approaches to cloud computing – a blended strategy of using outside cloud services and internal private cloud.

At the same time, he says, any and all new software development – both within enterprises and among vendors – is now taking place around a cloud model versus the traditional on-premises approach. “Right now, we’re at a pretty strong inflection point right now,” he explains. “Very little, if anything, being built on traditional go-install-on-your-local-device model. Almost nothing going forward is going to be built within that traditional framework.”

In the next installment of my chat with E&Y’s David Nichols, we discuss how cloud is changing the roles and relationships of outsourcers, entrepreneurs, and IT professionals, with advice on building a successful cloud relationship.

Published: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/01/17/why-a-hybrid-approach-to-cloud-computing-

works-best-for-now/





http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/01/17/why-a-hybrid-approach-to-cloud-computing-works-best-for-now/�

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/01/17/why-a-hybrid-approach-to-cloud-computing-works-best-for-now/�



About J oe Mc K endric k Joe McKendrick is an author and independent researcher, covering innovation, information technology trends and markets. He also can be found speaking (and listening!) at business IT, cloud and SOA industry events and Webcasts. He serves on the program committee for this year's SOA & Cloud Symposium in London. He is also one of 17 co-authors of the SOA Manifesto, which outlines the values and guiding principles of service orientation in business and IT.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joe-mckendrick/2/80/168





http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joe-mckendrick/2/80/168�



Hybrid cloud: Extend Your Private Cloud With Public Cloud Services By Doug Dineley, InfoWorld

Have you noticed how much technology vendors like to talk about stuff that doesn't exist? The so-called hybrid cloud is one of the utopian dreams of cloud computing, a vision of seamless interoperability between the private cloud running in your data center and resources at your disposal in one or more public clouds. A heavily marketed work in progress, the hybrid cloud promises such colorful new use cases as "cloud bursting" and "follow the sun" and "follow the moon" computing.

Before we get to seamless, though, we'll get hybrid clouds with seams. VMware, Microsoft, and open source rivals OpenStack and CloudStack are building cloud software stacks designed for both private and public deployments, giving administrators common management tools, and developers common APIs, across the different environments. Similarly, Eucalyptus has built its private cloud business on compatibility with Amazon Web Services APIs, allowing customers who have built applications on AWS to deploy them on-premise, and vice versa.

Compatibility and consistency across private and public clouds means being able to create assets -- virtual machines, provisioning templates, automation scripts -- in one place and use them in another. It also paves the way to coordinating the use of private cloud and public cloud resources. You could run an application's Web tier in the public cloud for easier and more elastic scalability, while keeping the back-end database in the private data center, for example. Or you could run Web app servers in both clouds, triggering the provisioning of additional instances in the public cloud in response to spikes in application usage -- an example of cloud bursting.

However, while a certain degree of hybrid cloud goodness is available today, more pieces must fall into place before we can think seriously of using a public cloud as a seamless extension of the data center. First, none of the leading cloud stacks, open source or proprietary, currently supports multisite management. Even when private and public clouds share the same kinds of tools, each cloud must be managed separately.

Second, migrating live workloads from one cloud to another will require network virtualization techniques -- such as Cisco's OTV, VMware's VXLAN, or Microsoft's NVGRE -- that are only just emerging. Not even considering the distance limitations imposed by WAN latency, we're sure to see many more suns and moons before virtual machines begin hopping from data center to data center and following users around the globe..

Published: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/doug-dineley/0/48b/951





http://www.linkedin.com/pub/doug-dineley/0/48b/951�



About Doug Dineley Doug Dineley is executive editor of the InfoWorld Test Center.

http://br.linkedin.com/pub/thoran-rodrigues/14/892/b2b





http://www.infoworld.com/author-bios/doug-dineley�

http://br.linkedin.com/pub/thoran-rodrigues/14/892/b2b�



The Hybrid Cloud: What Is It, and How Do You Get There? By Mike Fratto, Editor at Network Computing

Hybrid cloud. You're all aiming for it--that's what vendors, analysts and respondents to a soon-to-be-released private cloud survey are saying. The upcoming InformationWeek survey found that 61% of those building a private cloud and currently using public cloud plan to adopt a hybrid-cloud approach. Let's see what needs to be done before you get there.

First, let's assume that hybrid cloud means running a set of applications across a private cloud (a cloud infrastructure you own and manage) and a public cloud (compute, storage and networking resources that someone else owns and manages but you use/lease/rent). Sometimes the application is here, sometimes it's there, and sometimes it's in both places. There are a few hurdles to get over.

You have to get the application and its associated data to the right place at the right time, which isn't as easy as it may seem. Many enterprise applications are built with the assumption that the stuff they depend on will be close by, and if more processing power is needed, then you can add another server and direct load to it. If you're going to use a hybrid cloud to move processing between clouds, then you need to make sure the applications are already residing in both places. Given the size of many virtual machines (VMs)--measured in the tens of gigabytes--you will need to preposition the bits and keep them up to date or wait for several hours, days or weeks to get the bits where they need to be.

There are several ways to position the applications. The most likely is building an OS image in the cloud service and installing your applications there, rather than trying to move an existing VM from your private-cloud environment to a public cloud. Frankly, the transport time to move a VM from here to there will likely be so long that it would be faster to reprovision. With management tools like Puppet and Chef, ensuring that servers and applications are properly configured is pretty easy.

Moving the data is a different issue. It's simplistic, and likely wrong, to think that you need to move your entire data store to either location. You may find you can get away with keeping your data in one location and accessing it from anywhere. Obviously, you need to be aware of the additional delay and bandwidth costs, but a few milliseconds won't matter much, depending on your application. Oh, I know delay is cumulative and reducing delay is always a good thing, but here you have balance--acceptable delay versus the benefit of a hybrid cloud. You may even be able to mitigate delay, with some creative prefetching, caching and other application-level tuning.

If you must move data, perhaps you can move just the portion that will likely be required, rather than the entire data store. If the data store has to be in both places in its entirety, you're looking at setting up some sort of replication and synchronization. That can be pricey, considering that you'll need to purchase and manage the replication software. You'll be paying for not only the cloud storage, but also the cost to transport the data. It starts to add up.







Then there's the networking. Networking in the public cloud is generally pretty pathetic compared with what you have in-house. In many cases, you can't even define VLAN IDs or IP subnets in cloud networks. I know a number of enterprise applications require fixed IP addresses and are hard to change once set. I also know there are IT admins who insist that static IP addresses are still the only way to go. Forget it. Wherever you can, replace fixed, static IP addresses with host names and let applications resolve host names to IP addresses the way Internet pioneers Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris intended.

Alternatively, you could look at overlay network products that encapsulate inter-VM traffic and just ignore what's underneath. And let's not forget that if you're going to move an application to another location and possibly IP address, or run the app in both places, you'll need to direct traffic to each location.

Getting to a hybrid cloud isn't impossible. In fact, with proper design and engineering, it's quite achievable--provided you determine what your application demands really are and how you can meet them while splitting processing among different locations..

Published: http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/the-hybrid-cloud-what-is-it-and-how-do-y/240001292





http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/the-hybrid-cloud-what-is-it-and-how-do-y/240001292�



About Mike F ratto Mike Fratto is Editor of Network Computing and is track chair for Interop's Data Center and Storage tracks. He has been with TechWeb for over 11 years and has extensive experience evaluating enterprise remote access, security, and network infrastructure products. He previously was Lead Analyst with InformationWeek Analytics, Senior Technology Editor with Network Computing and Executive Editor for Secure Enterprise. He has spoken at several conferences including Interop, MISTI, the Internet Security Conference, as well as to local groups. He is track chair for the data center and storage tracks at Interop. He also teaches a network security graduate course at Syracuse University. Prior to Network Computing, Mike was an independent consultant.

http://www.twitter.com/mfratto





http://www.networkcomputing.com/author/bio/Mike-Fratto�

http://www.twitter.com/mfratto�



The Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds By Kyle MacDonald

More and more organizations are deploying cloud-based solutions, both to reduce in-house infrastructure and management costs and to gain access to virtual networks, compute resources and storage on demand.

However, while the cloud’s potential to increase IT agility and reduce costs is well known, vertical industry regulations and corporate privacy policies often prevent sensitive data and workloads from being managed in the public cloud. For organizations that want to keep some of its IT behind corporate firewalls, while exploiting the cost and scalability of the public cloud, the hybrid cloud is the way forward.

In hybrid cloud environments, private cloud infrastructure behind the firewall provides control, regulatory compliance, cost management and security. At the same time, public cloud elements offer economic efficiency, burst capacity and disaster recovery. With careful planning and the right tools, it’s possible to scale private cloud infrastructure into public clouds such as Rackspace, Amazon, HP and others.

Hybrid C loud C hallenges To successfully build and run a hybrid cloud and achieve these benefits, organizations must tame the complexity that traditionally surrounds cloud design and construction.

Bear in mind that clouds combine diverse infrastructure components, from hardware, networks and storage, to operating systems and applications. These are typically developed independently to different cloud standards, with different configurations. In addition, specialized skills are needed to connect them – increasing deployment timelines and costs.

To build a hybrid cloud, all its constituent parts have to be deployed at the same time, in a fully integrated way. They also need to work as dynamic elements of a bigger whole to deliver true computing elasticity on either side of the corporate firewall – as well as automated provisioning and de-provisioning, open APIs and pay-as-you-go metering and billing.

To make hybrid clouds work well, organizations should steer clear of proprietary technologies and their proprietary APIs. As well as limiting integration of private and public cloud infrastructure, proprietary technologies follow the ‘use more, pay more’ financial model, which is never economically viable in a truly elastic computing environment.

Open-S ourc e: E s s ential for the Hybrid C loud What’s needed to build hybrid clouds is technology that is truly open-source, and based on open cloud standards. Only this kind of technology provides the dynamic integration needed between private and public cloud infrastructure, while supporting cost effective scaling of computing resources.







To this end, key open-source initiative OpenStack has been deployed as the foundation for many of the leading public clouds – including Rackspace, Amazon, HP and more. However, by giving organizations the same open-standards-based components, standards and APIs for their private clouds, OpenStack also allows workloads to be migrated quickly and easily from private to public infrastructure, making the vision of the hybrid cloud a reality.

R apid S ervic e P rovis ioning and S c aling in the Hybrid C loud With OpenStack infrastructure in place, organizations have the standard APIs and management tools they need to seamlessly integrate private and public cloud infrastructure. However, they still need fast, simple ways to provision and scale services and capacity across the hybrid cloud.

Some leading cloud companies are developing orchestration tools to speed service provisioning – making it virtually a ‘point-and-click’ operation. These tools can offer significant productivity benefits for organizations deploying services in the hybrid cloud.

Recently an entirely new approach to developing and deploying cloud-based services has been developed. This is based on collections of code that contain all the information needed to deploy, connect and scale services in the cloud in minutes. Many of these collections are created by the worldwide open-source community.

These code collections offer all the typical cloud components organizations need – from popular databases and web application servers, to load balancing systems and computational frameworks. They are cloud neutral, so they work as well on private and hybrid clouds, and fully support EC2, Rackspace, HP and a range of other public infrastructure.

C ontrolling the Hybrid C loud A major question for organizations is how to stay in control of their hybrid cloud environment as users continually provision new services, transition workloads and scale up resources. To address this challenge, businesses should look to deploy a dashboard for the hybrid cloud, which ensures compliance with regulations for systems and data management and offers a range of features for controlling hybrid cloud environments.

Using a dashboard, organizations can synthesize multiple clouds - like Amazon, AT&T, HP, and private clouds - into a single unified hybrid cloud. Users access private and public infrastructure as if they were one single cloud, with access controls and policies to govern which cloud region employees can create workloads in and how many instances they can run concurrently.

By deploying this kind of management solution,, organizations can give their employees a single API, a single credential and a single configuration for working in the cloud. It’s also possible to add relationships with new public cloud providers without having to create new credentials for employees,







or provide them with new configuration information. The new regions just show up in the unified hybrid cloud as soon as they come online.

S upporting the Hybrid C loud There is still a perception that moving to cloud-based infrastructure and services implies a less well-supported environment. However, businesses should demand enterprise-class support for their private, public and hybrid clouds.

Elastic support arrangements should cover a core number of machines, or an unlimited quantity of cloud-based instances. Based on this model, organizations can ensure their cloud environments are supported from end to end for a fixed, transparent fee.

Support packages should extend far beyond fast issue resolution and direct access to hybrid cloud experts. Those that lead the market also include IP assurance, compliance with government certification standards and cloud monitoring, reporting and administration tools. Free upgrades and security releases should also come as standard.

L as t W ord Open-source technologies provide the integration, dynamism and economic model required to build and deploy hybrid cloud infrastructure. However, not all open-source technology is equal.

To ensure success, organizations should choose systems that are optimized at every level to support elastic scaling of IT resources across hybrid cloud infrastructure. As well as being based on OpenStack, the de facto cloud standard, cloud infrastructure should provide standard APIs for accessing private and public infrastructure; intuitive monitoring and management tools for the hybrid cloud environment; and tools for rapidly deploying, provisioning and scaling cloud-based services.

Lastly, but no less importantly, support should extend across private and public infrastructure. This provides the peace of mind that the infrastructure will deliver the security, availability and performance that today’s businesses need.

.

Published: http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2012/08/21/hybrid-cloud-best-both-worlds





http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2012/08/21/hybrid-cloud-best-both-worlds�



About K yle Mac Donald Kyle MacDonald is the Vice President of Cloud at Canonical. He is responsible for strategy and execution of the Ubuntu Cloud business. Past roles include serving as Chief Evangelist at Cloud.com, Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy at Hosting.com/Wachovia Capital Partners, and executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet, and next-gen service providers sector at Sun Microsystems.

https://twitter.com/kylemacdonald





http://www.virtual-strategy.com/users/kylemacdonald�

https://twitter.com/kylemacdonald�



Why You Should Consider Hybrid Cloud Computing For Your Business By Florence de Borja, CloudTweaks

Hybrid cloud computing was introduced in 2008 and it wasn’t accepted with open arms. With public and private clouds in place, cloud computing believers felt they already have enough. But then, as time goes on, hybrid clouds are inching their way to the forefront to be recognized. They are now being regarded as important and valid for businesses. The challenge now for hybrid cloud computing is to get past the initial resistance of cloud computing providers who are now promoting extensively the use of public clouds. Needless to say, these cloud providers are barring the cloud computing improvement and progress. In fact, most small and medium scale businesses have doubts about public clouds.

Hybrid clouds can enable enterprises to tap public clouds for some IT infrastructure while the rest of the IT infrastructure can be left on site. In some instances, it is still best to keep the enterprise data on site while the processing and applications stay in public clouds. Hybrid clouds provide value to businesses because it provides an opportunity to combine various resources, which can be provided on demand and highly scalable, with local infrastructure. Enterprises can opt to locate their data and applications on the best platforms then distribute processing among the resources. Not everything must be located in public clouds due to security restrictions, performance requirements, and compliance issues. The hybrid model, so far, is the best option for enterprises.

Cloud computing provides scalability and server virtualization but there are some instances where it is not possible to adapt. Virtualization, on the other hand, draws the line for network security boundaries for deployments and business service. It is able to define which can elements can be moved or placed. Basically, it can offer network security layer. It can also offer an abstraction of the application tier over boundaries of cloud deployment. Because virtual private cloud technologies and cloud computing are evolving, enterprises can now match the infrastructure to the application needs inexpensively and efficiently.

When entities build a hybrid cloud strategy, they have to consider management, deployment, and automation for optimal results to their business services. Anybody wishing to implement hybrid clouds must have thorough knowledge of each deployment schemes like hosted, internal, and public clouds so that these schemes can be linked efficiently and effectively through traditional deployments in a virtual private cloud. Deployment expenses can be streamlined by creating a strategy which can best optimize the entity’s business services. IT service delivery must be provisioned quickly at very minimal costs.

There are enterprise architects who can be tapped to be able to obtain the best deployment model for the business. The enterprise architect will be able to suggest the kinds of deployments needed, and the parts of applications that can be deployed in different resources along with the corresponding data sets. Data protection must also be of utmost consideration. The enterprise can tap the services of risk management and security experts for better judgment regarding deployment of applications. A policy must be created for every application development experts so that they can be guided regarding the







utilization of cloud resources. Current hosting providers of the company can also be consulted regarding their future plans on cloud computing so that you can plan accordingly. Some of these providers are already offering cloud services. When planning a cloud computing strategy, it is best to understand what these hosting providers are currently offering or planning to offer, what configurability degree can be provisioned by them, and what virtual private cloud services they can provide between their clouds and the enterprise’s data center.

A hybrid cloud strategy may be the smartest move any enterprise can make because it is able to mix and match various elements of hosted, internal, and public cloud computing.

Published: http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2012/04/why-you-should-consider-hybrid-cloud-computing-for-your-

business/





http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2012/04/why-you-should-consider-hybrid-cloud-computing-for-your-business/�

http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2012/04/why-you-should-consider-hybrid-cloud-computing-for-your-business/�



Hybrid Cloud model: Challenges and Opportunities By Lux Rao, InformationWeek

The In the global marketplace, enterprises must move quickly to capitalize on the latest growth opportunities and stay one step ahead of the competition. IT services play an important role in fostering the innovation required to fuel new business ventures. Today, CIOs need to be in a constant state of readiness to provide their users with the technology services to enable innovative business opportunities and respond to customer demands.

Cloud computing, with its promises of fast delivery, flexibility and cost savings, has emerged as a viable option for providing agile IT services. By utilizing cloud services, enterprises can look ahead to anticipate customer needs and predict business trends without having to worry about the IT infrastructure, platforms and applications that might be required to support them.

From a business perspective, the appeal of cloud is clear: speed, flexibility, economics. The idea of going to a portal to request a service that is instantly provided has innate appeal, particularly compared to the experience they have with most internal IT departments. It only takes a credit card. For many years, businesses are asking for better user experience with intuitive user interface, access to data and their business processes anytime, anywhere. They want access fast at Internet speed now and last but not least they want a flexible model that adapts to the business changes.

While end users believe it is allowing them to respond faster to their business needs, without a comprehensive plan and governance model, they could jeopardize the security of their enterprise data and applications. Additionally, CIO’s cannot effectively track, measure and budget for this shadow IT so businesses don’t have a true picture of how their resources are used. CIO’s are struggling with 70 percent of resources captive in maintenance and operations.

CIOs need solutions today that will accelerate the deployment of service-oriented environments, matching the speed, flexibility and economics of public clouds but without the risk or loss of control.

T he Hybrid C hoic e CIOs are mapping their path to the cloud and identifying where public and private cloud solutions will be leveraged - a mix of IT delivery methods to meet their users’ demands.

In a hybrid world of IT delivery choices, where public cloud and private cloud are becoming viable options along with traditional IT services, the onus is now on IT leaders to determine which of their current and future technology projects would benefit most from which model. They also must determine how to turn this mix of services into a blended environment where both the man¬agement and the end-user experience are seamless and simple.







Creating a hybrid IT delivery environment requires a thorough analysis of each project, as well as tools that manage the different delivery options in a uni¬fied, simplified way

Making the decision to go with a cloud model or a traditional IT service is one that enterprise executives rely on CIOs to lead, regardless of whether the idea for a new application comes from IT or a different department entirely. In order to make the right choice, CIOs should first consider the scope and nature of the application

If the application in question contains sensitive or confidential data, moving it to a public cloud that is located off-site may not be the best solution due to real or perceived security and privacy risks. The same is true for a mission-critical application that—if hit by performance delays or lapses in availability—will have a significant impact on business.

Applications earmarked for cloud services must be able to reside on shared compute resources, and the resource requirements for those programs should be clearly understood up front, to prevent poor performance or unexpected fees once the application is moved to a cloud service. Also required is consideration regarding how the governance of an application—control, policy changes and upgrades—might be altered in a cloud model.

Optimize the mix To make the most of a hybrid environment, there needs to be a unified management approach. In doing so, CIOs can deliver the services their users demand without putting additional management strain on the IT department.

Application and system management tools are evolving so that IT services, be they cloud-based or traditional, can subscribe to a common management layer and offer a unified view of an organization’s services portfolio.

Predefined, fully automated workflows help speed and simplify service delivery, allowing self-service and automation technology to be applied. With these tools, users can get for themselves the services they need, quickly provisioning IT assets by accessing a self-service portal to build, manage and monitor services.

Such tools offer the best of both worlds; users get the speed of deployment and flexibility they need, and IT departments maintain control over their technology environment. This orchestration in essence makes managing hybrid IT delivery environments as standardized and unified as managing homogenous environments, but at the same time allows enterprises to choose the best delivery method for the task at hand and optimize that method for their own use.

A service delivery road map helps IT leaders chart their options going forward, which gives them an opportunity to weigh the advantages of different methods and (hopefully) avoid pitfalls.CIOs today must make the right choice among private clouds, public clouds and traditional IT to maximize benefits, minimize risk and propel business.







Published: http://www.informationweek.in/Cloud_Computing/12-04-

26/Hybrid_Cloud_model_Challenges_and_Opportunities.aspx

About L ux R ao Lux Rao is Country Lead, Cloud Consulting at HP India.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/luxrao





http://www.informationweek.in/Cloud_Computing/12-04-26/Hybrid_Cloud_model_Challenges_and_Opportunities.aspx�

http://www.informationweek.in/Cloud_Computing/12-04-26/Hybrid_Cloud_model_Challenges_and_Opportunities.aspx�

http://www.linkedin.com/in/luxrao�



Hybrid Cloud: Harsh Reality And New Challenges By Sasha Gilenson, CEO, Evolven

So we can definitely say now that cloud computing is not just a trend anymore. Yes, there is no denying it: companies are either moving to the cloud or seriously thinking about it.

Yet many questions are still being raised: How will the cloud integrate properly with my existing environment? Can IT keep control of workloads, data, and even costs? How secure is cloud?

Many organizations consider the public cloud to be less stable and secure than their physical data center, making them reluctant to place applications and underlying infrastructure in the hands of third party cloud providers. Despite pressures from business, security concerns, combined with the fear of the unknown, hold IT back from adopting public cloud services.

So to deal with today's agile development and fast pace of change, many in IT are looking to move applications to a private cloud. The private cloud offers the elasticity and availability of the cloud, while still staying under the control of IT and, if required, within the firewall. But what about dynamically adding new resources when you need to meet instantly growth on-demand?

For these occasional peaks, a public cloud can be leveraged. Then how can you keep an eye on what's happening in all your clouds and still hopefully make the right decisions at the right time?

T he Hybrid C onc ept is T aking Off With E nterpris es This is where the hybrid cloud concept comes in. Hybrid cloud can address these issues of integrating public clouds, legacy IT and private clouds together. This mix offers IT operations the benefits of self-serve provisioning and consumption-based optimization.

Hybrid is not new to the enterprise. Organizations have been managing most IT resources in-house and using some cloud-based services for others for some time, allowing enterprises to maintain a centralized approach to IT governance, while experimenting with cloud. Leading analysts like Forrester, Gartner and others see hybrid cloud architecture emerging in the enterprise and even forcing the issue of legacy systems migration by 2015.

Yet just as hybrid cloud combines the best features of the different platforms, it also introduces more complexity and less visibility. The key to getting the maximum value from all the Cloud resources will be to properly manage the hybrid operating environment.

P ower of Hybrid One of the key benefits of a hybrid cloud is the ability to 'burst' computing resource as needed, in order to cope with peak requirements, like dealing with seasonal peaks (e.g. four weeks of Christmas business), without having to compound the underlying infrastructure with additional resources. Hybrid







cloud facilitates greater mobility, while keeping IT operations cost-effective. Hybrid offers organizations the potential to integrate various environments and leverage the cloud's dynamics and provisioning capabilities. This means that critical business backend services can be maintained in the private data center (legacy or private cloud) with the frontend, capacity intensive applications hosted in the public cloud, making it is easy to add additional resources to cover the additional frontend activity.

Declares Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner, "Hybrid IT is the new IT and it is here to stay. While the cloud market matures, IT organizations must adopt a hybrid IT strategy that not only builds internal clouds to house critical IT services and compete with public CSPs, but also utilizes the external cloud to house noncritical IT services and data, augment internal capacity, and increase IT agility. Hybrid IT creates symmetry between internal and external IT services that will force an IT and business paradigm shift for years to come." (Gartner Says Hybrid IT is Transforming the Role of IT).

Hybrid C loud Options When we talk about hybrid, what do we mean? The hybrid cloud architecture has several dimensions.

• Hybrid Public/Private: Some applications move to the private cloud, serving as a dedicated cloud infrastructure for use by one organization which can be internally or externally hosted, and some (less critical) applications are moved to public cloud, serving as a shared cloud infrastructure hosted by an external provider. The challenge is how to deal with security across several different public and private cloud instances, with barriers including: different providers, differing levels of security in the existing cloud apps, and lack of standards tying the various disparate initiatives together.

• Hybrid Public/Public: Following outages from some public cloud vendor service failures, many are looking at spreading their workloads among multiple clouds to mitigate risk. To hedge their bets, businesses are looking into multi-cloud solutions. Applications are deployed to several different public clouds, not in one cloud (multiple public cloud vendors). Another attraction for multiple clouds is that some public cloud offerings just don't have services, that another public cloud vendor can complement. For instance, Amazon doesn't have IaaS in the United Kingdom, but Rackspace does. Problems emerge with how to manage the connections to multiple cloud service providers. There is no one way to talk to all services. Each cloud service provider uses its own method for connection, like how Amazon and Rackspace have different hypervisors, different virtual machine file formats, and different service APIs. This creates a complex management problem with different processes for provisioning and management that can be counterproductive for outsourcing to multiple public clouds.

• Hybrid Legacy/Clouds: The integration of Legacy system with cloud services is still necessary, as many back end operations are run in legacy IT environments.





http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1940715�



The challenge comes in integrating legacy systems with cloud applications, a complex matter with ample room for error. Most software or application vendors have APIs that provide access to the data or processes in their systems, this leaves IT teams to create the scripts and infrastructure that manage this integration on their own, a task that is neither quick nor simple especially when dozens of applications are involved. As Forrester's Seepij Gupta explains, "These systems simply aren't architected or capable of running in a cloud environment, let alone a hybrid cloud scenario. Now, with compelling reasons to adopt hybrid cloud approaches, organizations are having a much tougher time integrating their environments. (Cloud's Impact On IT Operations: Don't Overlook Your Legacy)

Dealing with New C hallenges The complexities introduced by the cloud require new management techniques, and tools. These issues are multiplied by the need to manage several different environments. For example, you can have an application running in your private cloud, yet due to pressure for more availability, the capacity needs to be expanded. The fastest and most cost-effective way to deal with this on-demand matter is to move the application to a Public cloud.

Yet how do you maintain synchronization between these different environments? Won't the spun off image lose consistency with the image that stays in the source environment? How do you handle the issue of applications and application infrastructure moving between the different cloud environments, since there are different virtual machines for different platforms (i.e. VMware VMs, Citrix Xen, Red Hat KVM etc.)?

In the drive to reduce complexity, hybrid cloud sends you in the opposite direction, adding complexity as your operations start expanding on multiple platforms.

Hybrid S etup Needs S pec ialized T ools Tools for managing hybrid environments need new specialized features.

• Single Point of Reference: They need to provide a single point of view to manage multiple platforms. For instance, this can require collecting configuration data from your Azure environment and comparing it with the configuration used in your private cloud. Also since these various platforms in the hybrid environments may communicate with each other, the management tool should be able to monitor and analyze various parameters of these interfaces. This is an extremely tedious job when carried out without specialized tools and in many circumstances won't give the answers you need. How can you identify problems with the applications running across different cloud platforms? How can you access relevant system data from within the different clouds to speed up problem resolution?





http://blogs.forrester.com/seepij_gupta/12-03-01-clouds_impact_on_it_operations_dont_overlook_your_legacy�

http://blogs.forrester.com/seepij_gupta/12-03-01-clouds_impact_on_it_operations_dont_overlook_your_legacy�



• Visibility: IT operations have enjoyed visibility into the workings and transactions of the data center. The monitoring mechanisms for facilitating hybrid cloud require a management layer that can work all sides of the infrastructure , internal operations, private cloud, and even into the public cloud activity. While IT may have a management console for monitoring internal operations and the private cloud , public clouds have their own toolset for monitoring activity, limiting visibility to overall operations for when something happens in the private cloud that affects the public cloud.

More T rans itions , Migrations As organizations seek to adopt the benefits of cloud to meet the higher demands and faster pace of change in today's data center, hybrid provides a mechanism for bringing about this transition. Security concerns can be mitigated, and migration of traditional legacy operations can start by moving to a private cloud platform. Then as capacity demands increase, and the public cloud's reputation improves, these operations can be reliably transferred to public clouds. As Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner, explains, "Many organizations have now passed the definitional stage of cloud computing and are testing cloud architectures inside and outside the enterprise and over time, the cloud will simply become one of the ways that we 'do' computing, and workloads will move around in hybrid internal/external IT environments." (Gartner Says Hybrid IT is Transforming the Role of IT).

C onfiguration Management K ey to the Hybrid C loud E volution You can't make the assumption that cloud automatically results in an effective services-oriented business architecture. The highly dynamic nature of cloud-based operations increases the volume of configuration information and the amount of changes needed to keep track of. This complexity grows further by the added dimension of IT having to manage and control operations deployed across several distinct (and unique) cloud platforms, and pay attention to the requirements unique to each cloud's stack (private or public). Will your approach add complexity to your technology environment – or will it bring elegance and simplicity?

One of the key challenges is the integration between the two clouds. This can be addressed to some extent by adopting configuration management interfaces to monitor and analyze configuration as system transition between cloud entities, enabling application and data portability.

Published: http://www.evolven.com/blog/hybrid-cloud-harsh-reality-new-challenges.html





http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1940715�

http://www.evolven.com/blog/hybrid-cloud-harsh-reality-new-challenges.html�



About S as ha G ilens on Sasha Gilenson enjoyed a long and successful career at Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP), having led the company's QA organization, participating in establishing Mercury's Software as a Service (SaaS), as well as leading a Business Unit in Europe and Asia.

Sasha played a key role in the development of Mercury's worldwide Business Technology Optimization (BTO) strategy and drove field operations of the Wireless Business Unit, all while taking on the duties as the Mercury's top "guru" in quality processes and IT practices domain. In this capacity, Sasha has advised numerous Fortune 500 companies on technology and process optimization, and in turn, acquired a comprehensive and rare knowledge of the market and industry practices..

http://il.linkedin.com/pub/sasha-gilenson/0/2bb/3b3

https://twitter.com/sgilenson





http://www.evolven.com/management/management-team.html#sasha�

http://il.linkedin.com/pub/sasha-gilenson/0/2bb/3b3�

https://twitter.com/sgilenson�



About Evolven

About Evolven Evolven redefines configuration management and change management with its groundbreaking Change & Configuration Monitoring solution. Evolven’s software-as-a-service solution enables companies to dramatically increase the stability of their IT environments, reduce the risk of production outages, lower operating costs, and cut environment incident investigation time and effort.

Evolven's Change and Configuration Monitoring eliminates production outages. Really.

Start a free trial www.evolven.com/sign-up.html





http://www.evolven.com/sign-up.html�

ebook hybrid cloud

Documents