Hybrid Cloud Provider
It’s likely that the hybrid cloud providers will see a robust market for years into the future. However, there is some debate about what, exactly, constitutes the hybrid cloud. The term hybrid cloud has several definitions but all are rather similar to each other in the final analysis: a hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds working together but remaining distinct from each other. The clouds can either be from a public cloud provider (Salesforce, Amazon) or a private cloud that you maintain in your own data center.
This is the generally accepted definition. What's variable is the connection between one cloud provider and a company's own services. For most IT professionals, providers and services, a company using Salesforce or Microsoft Azure with their own internal systems is considered a hybrid cloud.
Not so, says Gartner, the leading IT market research firm. It defines the hybrid cloud as the coordinated use of two or more cloud environments operating in harmony. That could mean two public clouds, like ServiceNow and NetApp, or a public and private cloud connection.
"When we talk about hybrid cloud, we expect it will have all the attributes of cloud computing, so you access it as a service. It's scalable and elastic, you pay per use. Those are the fundamental definitions of cloud. If you have cloud plus non-cloud with coordination between them, that's great but it's not cloud. You are getting cloud on one side not on the whole experience. We call that hybrid IT," said Ed Anderson, research vice president with the firm.
Equally off the beaten path is Gartner's view on the top hybrid cloud providers. The reflexive answer would be the typical thought leaders: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. But Gartner views hybrid providers not as the service providers but as consultancies that will come to your business and help connect you. Microsoft and IBM have on-site consulting services but Google and Amazon do not to any great degree, he notes.
"If you called up Amazon and said 'I need a hybrid cloud,' they would say 'hybrid with what?' Well I want it to work with VMware,' they would say we have this capability or talk to a partner. In general that's not their offering services," said Anderson.
That's why his choices of the top hybrid providers might come as a bit of a surprise, but these are the firms that will show up, hold your hand, and make the connections between the public cloud and your internal systems, whether they follow the private cloud model or traditional IT.
