Our Cloud Obsession - Public vs Private vs Hybrid Debate
Christina Torode from SearchCIO.com recently published a piece discussing the merits of private cloud versus public cloud implementations, with the consensus that hybrid IT and a hybrid cloud computing approach will become “the dominant cloud adoption strategy.”
While we’re not shy about our belief that public cloud is the way to go, we also recognize that for a percentage of deployments, private architecture may be smarter choice for one reason or another. Of course in a hybrid world, we see it making the most sense for it to be “public cloud first” but with integrations back to on-premise systems being critical in nature.
In that vein, what we found particularly noteworthy in this post was the discussion around IT‘s changing role and responsibilities in this transformation. Specifically, the following quote on the from Gartner’s Drue Reeves caught our eye:
“In hybrid IT, location of the service is not important for IT. What matters is the ability to control the consumption of services, vet cloud providers on behalf of the business and use IT's technical knowledge to guide the business as to which applications are better kept in-house or moved to a public cloud.”
With this shift in responsibilities comes the growing demand for a new set of solutions to help IT become this “broker” of cloud IT services – not just in terms of application selection and providers, but also in terms of companywide implementation and employee use.
It seems that identity is the right place to start. Not only does this concept support the hybrid cloud model by being integrated back to Active Directory, but it also enables IT to view and control which web-based applications employees access. We see this as the most strategic imperative for IT – empowering users with the right applications at the right time, while also achieving complete visibility over the environment – whatever the make-up.
In a hybrid world, it should be best of both (public and private) worlds – with IT in the driver’s seat.