Last week, I was invited by Leaseweb to take part in a panel discussion about the evolution of the hybrid cloud. Alongside me sat Robert van der Meulen (Cloud Manager, LeaseWeb), Avi Shalisman (CEO, MoovingON), and Anatoly Atamanov (Director IT Operations, MyThings). As a result of this panel discussion, I’d like to share some of the challenges that IT faces in this seemingly inevitable transition to a hybrid cloud model. Although many things have already been said about the topic, I still feel the need to define what it means (yes…again), as well as what it is not.
I see the hybrid cloud as a sub-section of multi-cloud deployment, meaning IT users use both internal (private cloud) and external (public cloud) environments. While this sounds pretty straightforward, I’ve come to understand that there is no real alignment in terms of the definition of the hybrid cloud. As mentioned above, this article will identify certain challenges that are faced when building a hybrid cloud. While these challenges may (still) keep IT teams from even wanting to begin building a hybrid cloud, the business side of many companies is increasingly moving towards using the public cloud.
There are several incentives of building a hybrid cloud. Some see the public cloud as an extension of their on-premises environment; some simply want to use the public cloud for everything outside of mission critical applications and data that is kept on their trustful on-premises environment for increased security. Regardless of what your incentive is, it’s important to be aware of possible challenges lurking ahead.
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