A growing number of enterprises are adopting both private and public cloud computing models. While virtualization, cloud, mobility, data analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are providing tremendous opportunities for businesses, they are also creating new challenges for IT departments. Certain workloads are better suited to the private cloud, whereas other, often newer applications can
benefit from deployment in the public cloud. This means that for enterprises, a comprehensive approach to hybrid cloud is both desirable and practical. The challenge is finding an architectural model that can accommodate multiple business objectives, various workloads, and workload mobility using an open approach to hypervisors and cloud platforms. This Technology Spotlight discusses
these trends and the role that Cisco Intercloud Fabric plays in addressing the challenges they are posing.
Introduction
Recent IDC research has found that a growing number of enterprises are adopting both private and public cloud computing models. Their primary motivations for embracing public cloud are not the same as the primary drivers for adopting private cloud. These enterprises, which span a broad range of vertical markets, understand that each cloud variant offers its own unique set of benefits.
Enterprises that favor one cloud approach over the other have good reasons for doing so, just as enterprises that embrace both have a thorough appreciation of how each serves distinct objectives and confers different value propositions.
While enterprise business objectives — namely, what business value the enterprise wishes to derive from the cloud — obviously represent a critical factor in how the cloud is leveraged, workloads also figure heavily into deliberations. The types and volumes of workloads have evolved and expanded with each successive era of computing. The centralized mainframe era was succeeded by the client/server era, and now we have entered a new period in which workloads are characterized by virtualization, cloud, mobility, data analytics (big data), and social media — with the IoT also entering the picture, bringing with it a further profusion of device-based traffic and the need for extensive data analytics.
For enterprise IT departments, however, the need persists to support both legacy and new application workloads. In fact, the diversity and growth of workloads present both opportunities and challenges for businesses seeking to capitalize on the perceived and real value of private cloud and public cloud. For a number of reasons, certain application workloads are better suited to the capabilities of the private cloud, whereas others are more amenable to running in public clouds. Fixed (steady-state) applications, for example, often have compliance or control requirements that cannot be accommodated by public clouds. What’s more, even if those control and security issues can be addressed, making the business case for running steady-state applications in the public cloud can be difficult. Conversely, elastic (or variable) application workloads are well suited to the “cloud bursting” capabilities that public cloud provides. It’s also worth noting that many legacy applications, built for a client/server delivery model, cannot easily be transferred to public cloud environments, and frequently there is no inclination to move them.
View the full document here: Achieving a Hybrid Cloud Balance for Business
