Hybrid cloud adoption part of the near future

Stephen Withers
Monday, 17 May 2010 09:06

Business IT - Technology

A Microsoft executive has predicted that 80% of organisations will be using a mix of on-premises and cloud software in as little as three years time.

According to Robert Reynolds, Microsoft's director of product planning, System Center and Virtualisation, the next three to five years will see 80% of organisations using some combination of cloud computing and conventional on-premises software.
The challenge, he says, is to provide customers with control over such blended environments.

Reynolds suggests the way ahead is to take an application-centric view of the problem, and let the system deliver the right application to the right device for the user. This will provide enough central control to keep most organisations happy, while giving users enough say so they can get their work done (eg, specifying that all applications must be local on a notebook that will be used during air travel).

This must be achieved through a single management system, he says, and there is also a need to set and impose policies on 'foreign' delivery technologies. Microsoft's System Center already accommodates application management plug-ins, and a future version will add Xen virtualisation management.

So far, the emphasis has largely been on private clouds, but there is also a need to extend control to public clouds. Cloud providers may vary in terms of the amount of information they will make available, but their customers will demand access to systems in order to answer operational questions such as 'is there sufficient capacity on this system for another virtual machine?'

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