Making hybrids work

When the phenomenon called Cloud made appearance on the IT landscape, it promised to disrupt many existing paradigms. You don’t need to buy any server hardware and storage, capacity is available on demand and you pay for what you use. Applications with licencing models that can adapt to business cycles, Everything-As-A-Service (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and many more), no capital investments, only operating expense. It was touted to be the silver bullet to solve all the budgeting challenges of the CIO including getting rid of the CIO.

Evolution brought competition and a hysterical wave that caught every Vendor, System Integrator, Research Analyst, and the CIO alike. New terms were coined to depict the key attributes that the cloud promised: agility, flexibility, resilience, scalability, and on-demand. Alliances of hardware, software and networking vendors vied for attention; everything was cloud-enabled or ready. When corporate data centres could not be classified, the term “Private Cloud” came to rescue.

It brought some comfort to the CIO that s/he was not seen as “not doing the in thing”; almost everyone now had a cloud, private or public. From there rose the challenge of making them work together. After all if some apps are on the public cloud while the transactional systems or other apps are still in the corporate data center  they need to inter-operate  Tools and technology solutions attempted to bridge the chasm; everyone had a variant that did something better than the other confusing the heck out of IT teams.

Someone christened the new reality of the coexistence as “Hybrid Cloud” and the term has stuck on. For simpler solutions, applications and processes like collaboration, sales force automation and the likes of Human Capital Management, the challenge was easily overcome by most. Pervasive challenges of security, data residue, service levels, interoperability between different clouds, or difficulty in migrating from one service provider to another, cut across every offering.

Evolution of the services and technology has not been uniform; a few still struggle to offer a consistent experience straddling between the data center and the public cloud. A CIO narrated a harrowing story of his journey towards making a hybrid cloud work to offer a consistent and uniform experience to his users. The vendor in question either due to ignorance or over-enthusiasm promised everything to be possible and the delivery team struggled to get even the basics working.

Step by step through the early stages of making things work, they did not just lose time, the arduous journey had the IT team struggling to explain to the CIO why the project was running totally off target. Most were not technology challenges but oversell to the CIO on what would work and how it would. Straddling the physical and cloud world to offer a seamless and uniform experience to users did pose a few challenges. I guess all clouds are not created equal as competing solutions did offer to expectation.

The CIO called for a review and experts from all over the world joined in to rescue the situation. It was a one-sided affair with no real solution emerging to the problem at hand. The CIO concluded with the pilot being disbanded. The resultant credibility loss alienated the vendor in no small measure undoing a lot of the good work that they had delivered in the past. It was almost like the nursery rhyme in real world “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put the vendor back on track again”.

I guess when it comes to hybrid, cars work and have achieved a maturity level that brings consumer confidence; with clouds I guess there are still challenges to overcome and technology to reach stability and interoperability. Until then stay cautious and don’t bet on everything to work the way it did in a pure cloud or in-house model. The user experience with hybrids can be a dampener on the enthusiasm that vendors and system integrators want you to feel while they experiment at your cost.

P.S. it would appear that the next wave promises Autonomic Computing, anyone game ?