In few years we may see growth in the importance of SDDC, which will lead to new levels of automation and flexibility in IT services.
By Anoop Verma
The cloud is marvellous, but it isn’t perfect. Mobile apps, collaboration services, relationship management systems, document storing and editing solutions, are changing the way we live and work, but it is clear that the tech-edifice of cloud computing is far from perfect. If the speed at which we access our data is slow, the cloud is not useful. In case the data is less secure than when it is stored in our own servers, then it is quite useless.
The enterprises need a cloud that is secure, reliable, fast, scalable, compliant with all the regulations and free of data sovereignty related issues. More and more consumers are realising that they can’t totally rely on public cloud systems and the private cloud is not only costlier, it also makes it difficult to deliver innovations at better value.
The hybrid cloud has been developed by combining the best features of public and private clouds. With hybrid environment, you can quickly explore new technology, at much lower cost. There is the option of efficient scalability, as you can rent extra computing power during the periods of higher demands.
For business continuity and disaster recovery, hybrid cloud is commonly being put to use. Most CIOs agree that a hybrid environment is a necessity.
A recent report from Gartner says that 2016 will be the defining year for cloud computing in India, as private cloud will begin to give way to the hybrid cloud. By 2017, the report predicts, nearly half of the large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments.
However, even in the hybrid cloud space, things are not peachy-keen. The downside is that the hybrid systems inherit many of the problems that beset both public and private clouds.
Hybrid clouds are also difficult to design and unless the workloads are properly understood and monitored, friction can develop between IT groups functioning from their own silos. The security related concerns and the data sovereignty related issues are still there.
In few years we may see growth in the importance of SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center), which will lead to new levels of automation and flexibility in IT services. With the SDDC, the customers may not migrate entire data centres to the cloud, essentially they will be migrating their applications—an application can be an array of 5, 10, or 50 computer servers, which collectively perform a business function.
Regardless of the combination of cloud infrastructure, platform or software that is being used, what is important is that the access to the system should be fast, secure and available from any device. Someday we will have technology to achieve this. Today, we don’t.
