There is a temptation to think that all cloud operating models are identical and are commonly driven by interest in commodity IT, or IT delivered at the lowest possible cost.  For many (especially early) cloud customers may certainly be the case.  I predict, however, that hybrid cloud will be driven by very different operating expectations, driven by new solutions that set new IT productivity standards.  It will be driven more by value-added IT, or IT services delivered at the highest level of productivity and speed. 

The current popular forms of cloud can be difficult to enter and even more difficult to depart. Plenty of risk-prone and frustrating manual processes are in between the promoted and real economics of public cloud. In the case of cloud and even with the occasional outage, the journey may be much riskier and costlier than the destination. That may be the major reason enterprises have been hesitant to invest in migrating their apps into public clouds.

That is why I found Anand’s blog on hybrid cloud requirements so relevant to the cloud definition discussion.  There will likely be many cloud vendors who see hybrid cloud as simply adding a public cloud to a data center and perhaps a private cloud.  They view private and public clouds as complimentary. Cloud migration is simply the act of moving an app from one isolated island to another.

I think many miss the point that the cloud and data center components of a hybrid cloud are synergistic, not merely complimentary. A hybrid cloud is the product (not the sum) of the seamless integration of data centers and public and private clouds. A hybrid cloud enables a new generation of cloud migration, cloud devtest and cloud failover solutions.

That’s why I was also grateful to see our VP of Engineering post his recent blog about cloud devtest and why the cloud could be an especially powerful game changer for app developers. Again, that takes us to a true hybrid cloud, or the ability for apps and services to run without modification across data centers and clouds. 

• VMware vCloud Delivers Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
• VMware and Partners Deliver Enterprise Hybrid Cloud: VMware vCloud Datacenter Services Available From BlueLock, Colt and Verizon
• Intel Hybrid Cloud and Cloud Storage