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Nic Cantuniar, Vice President of Cable&Wireless Worldwide: Which advantages does the adoption of a hybrid approach to cloud computing bring with it?

October 2010 by Marc Jacob

Nic Cantuniar, Vice President of Cable&Wireless Worldwide, gives us his thoughts on the adoption of cloud and on the preference for a hybrid approach, which combines the dedicated traditional dedicated infrastructure, dedicated virtual servers and cloud platforms. Nic Cantuniar explains the advantages of this approach in terms of technology just as well as in terms of security, availability and performance.

On September the 7th, during the Paris Microsoft Days, Microsoft, current CEO Steve Ballmer discussed cloud computing as a technology that will revolutionise the way businesses operate but, while it is all good news, the cloud is not new; in one form or another, network service providers have been offering cloud services for a number of years.

It must be remembered, however, that businesses run and operate a variety of applications with each having the potential for a different set of technical, security, availability and performance requirements that need to be considered when investigating cloud based services. As such, there will not be an immediate move to, or indeed a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to cloud computing for the foreseeable future. Instead, businesses will take a hybrid approach, making use of a set of technologies across traditional dedicated infrastructure, dedicated virtual servers, and cloud platforms with applications remaining in the environment that best suits their individual security requirements. This offers businesses today a ‘best of both worlds’ solution.

Hybrid cloud environments also allow organisations to adopt a gradual transition to cloud – one that, for large organisations, will take several years to execute. Being able to introduce cloud infrastructure alongside the existing IT estate, and managing that hybrid model, allows organisations to make the gradual transition into the cloud in a way that suits them. This also allows any business still hesitant to move to the cloud to gain confidence and decide on what model works best for the overall businesses needs and various applications as well as understanding the operational implications associated with adoption of cloud technologies.

For some organisations the cost of change of moving into the cloud may not make immediate commercial sense if they have already got infrastructure that is fit for purpose. However, there may still be a need to support peak load requirements – or growth requirements – and by adopting the cloud as a hybrid alongside their existing infrastructure, they can ‘burst’ into the cloud, taking advantage of the cost effectiveness of cloud whilst still utilising their existing assets.

In addition, the majority of Internet-based cloud services access points are exposed directly to the Internet, giving enterprises some security concerns. This can be addressed by ensuring that the prime access routes to the cloud computing environment are via the Wide Area Network (WAN), not the Internet. This bypasses any sense of anxiety for enterprises and large organisations that would prefer for applications in a cloud environment to not directly face the Internet. By placing these services in a secure cloud environment within the WAN, and by using the established methods of data separation between different customers in the cloud computing environment, data becomes intrinsically safer.

Organisations are continually looking for ways to make their operations more efficient and effective both in terms of cost savings and the deployment of business critical applications and cloud technologies represent a way of doing that. The hybrid adoption of cloud technology – utilising existing infrastructure alongside the consumption of cloud technologies – allows organisations to manage the transition to cloud in a controlled way, avoiding a high risk, and high cost, rip and replace of existing infrastructure yet still being able to pragmatically deliver business benefit.


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