Welcome to the Hybrid Age

Marc Olesen is the Senior VP and General Manager for Splunk.

Every company has a cloud strategy. If transitioning to the cloud is a journey, your strategy is your proverbial roadmap. It’s your GPS device giving you turn-by-turn directions as you head toward your destination.

As companies embark on their cloud journeys, they increasingly find themselves between destinations with some processes still running on-premises and others running flawlessly in the cloud. This is by design and a natural progression along a journey that may take months or years— a progression that has sparked the hybrid age.

The Hybrid Age

It’s easy to see why many organizations are starting to move to the cloud, given that the benefits include saving on infrastructure costs, cutting license fees and increasing scalability and agility. However, the transition to cloud isn’t a zero-sum game, nor does it happen with the flip of a switch. It’s a gradual implementation, with individual applications being moved to the cloud while others remain on-premises or in a private cloud.

These hybrid environments can include private and public clouds and on-premises IT infrastructures, all working together to deliver technology services to employees and customers. Hybrid environments deliver the “best of both worlds” to organizations that are looking to have the flexibility and cost savings offered by the cloud, but also want to keep some workloads on premises. As a result, businesses are becoming more and more comfortable with this model.

For most of these companies, the hybrid age is part of the broader cloud journey that’s becoming more common. For example, a 2014 report by Infonetics Research states that hybrid cloud is the next evolution in cloud architecture, with adoption among enterprises expected to more than double by 2015. Like any journey, there’s always something you never want to leave home without — and in this case, it’s visibility.

Visibility Into the Hybrid Cloud

Visibility across on-premises and cloud deployments is key to a safe and successful journey. It’s what helps companies understand cloud workloads and ensures service assurance, security and compliance. It helps you understand when things go wrong and why things are happening, which can be very difficult in a hybrid environment. Workloads across on-premises and the cloud need to be monitored, measured and secured. If cloud isn’t performing as expected, you need to find out if and where you took a wrong turn on your journey.

Visibility ensures that workloads in the cloud are as reliable and secure as they were on-premises, and will go a long way toward building confidence for a full transition. It gives you confidence with your current cloud applications to comfortably move more workloads to the cloud—and ultimately reach the final destination of your journey.

It’s the Journey and the Destination

On every major road trip, you learn a little a bit about yourself, and a lot about the world you haven’t explored yet. The move from on-premises, to hybrid, to full cloud deployments will require a change in mindset and corporate culture. The hybrid age is just one stop on a much longer cloud journey that will change how businesses around the world use technology. As you head down the path, make sure to reference your map and keep your eyes on the road.

Editor's note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series. The second article, "Learning to Trust in the Cloud," will be published on Thursday, Sept. 3.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.