From the Editor-in-Chief: Cirrus, Alto, Stratus

The higher business velocity and cost efficiency that hybrid models offer seem to indicate that managements will lean that way.

A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind… —W.B. Yeats When I first wrote an edit on cloud computing six years ago, an enterprise-class cloud was little more than vapourware. You’d think that after so many moons and increased maturity, cloud would be gathering momentum. Many conversations that I’ve been having with a host of CIOs point to a new trend emerging. Data from the CIO|14: The Year Ahead Survey bears witness that India Inc. is seeing a slowdown in investments into the private cloud, with a hybrid first model emerging.

Take today’s business demands of efficiency, agility and speed, add the blurry business horizon, with a generous helping of business end-goals and stir in the acute shortage of IT talent and you’re staring at a recipe for catastrophic business failure. CIOs, in trying to avoid this, would have few options than to move some workloads to the public cloud, while keeping the more critical ones within the perimeter.

Increasingly, however, I observe organizations begin the move to the public cloud early. Earlier than even putting a ‘private cloud’ in place! Yet whichever path gets chosen, it leads to one inescapable destination—the here and now and future of the cloud is hybrid. Companies might choose to keep some data and applications at home to escape issues with latency or compliance, the rest will need homes elsewhere—homes that will be rented. This will distress those who swear by ‘private clouds’. But, let’s be honest without two-way secure bursting a reality, the private cloud is essentially a foundation layer for the cloud without any of its agility or scale.

The higher business velocity and cost efficiency that hybrid models offer seem to indicate that managements will lean that way. How about you?