Hybrid Uprising in the Cloud

Hybrid cloud is the future, at least so say the Indian CIOs. In the last two years, CIO Research has been indicating a shift towards the surge in the adoption of hybrid cloud – from 35 percent of Indian CIOs showing a keen interest in deploying a mix of public and private cloud environments in 2013, the number has gone up by 10 percent since November last year.

“Whether it’s for applications, data, or storage, we are no longer debating over a private or a public cloud. Instead, we are deploying a hybrid environment to meet the shifting workloads, changing needs, and to concentrate on realizing the business outcomes.” says Hitesh Arora, CIO, Yum! Brands achieve a high level of flexibility that drives up resource utilization and enables easy integration between in-house and network-based IT infrastructure.

In a way, hybrid cloud is also changing the role of the CIO. Today, deploying a hybrid cloud model, in which IT resources are managed both in-house and by outsourced service providers, allows the CIOs to focus on delivering business value rather than managing existing infrastructure.

One of the main advantages of the hybrid cloud has been that it frees up IT’s time to innovate, besides offering the CIOs more control, better security, and higher reliability.

“The changing landscape has forced CIOs to leverage different cloud models. The pace at which I can deliver certain applications using a hybrid model is far greater than an on-premise environment,” explains Rajesh Uppal, executive director–IT and CIO of Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest car maker.

One of the main factors responsible for the surge in organizations embracing hybrid cloud is the increasing datacenter complexity. The growing number of business-critical applications and the growth in the volume of data are the top two reasons cited by CIOs for this increasing complexity in the datacenter. Single points of failure that increase the level of risk and the rise of management complexity due to the use of multiple tools within the organization also add to the complexity in the datacenter.

Due to this rising datacenter complexity and the factors associated with it, CIO research reveals that as much as 44 percent of CIOs are planning move their less critical systems on to the public cloud. As much as 31 percent of Indian CIOs planning to deploy CRM on public cloud, 42 percent of CIOs have shifted or planning to shift ‘mail and messaging’ to public cloud and 27 percent have deployed or planning to deploy ‘externally-facing web apps’ to public cloud.

“A hybrid approach gives you a mix of physical datacenter and virtualized cloud environment. Today, we are successfully operating out of a cloud and haven’t experienced any latency,” says Manoj Sharma, CTO, Quikr.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see how IT tackles issues such as network integration, manageability and legacy integration while deploying a hybrid environment. But that shouldn’t be difficult given the increasing level of comfort in the adoption of hybrid cloud.