Seven vendors topped Forrester’s first Wave for Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions, in spite of some confusion in the market as to what exactly “hybrid cloud” means.
Three vendors scored a place as strong contenders.
Scratch below the surface of the cloud computing hype of recent years, and you’ll find very few organizations doing a wholesale move to the cloud, with most choosing to retain data on premises while moving specific workloads to the cloud. Which is where hybrid cloud management vendors come in: they help organizations manage their on premises and cloud deployments.
Forrester named RightScale leader in hybrid cloud management, with Scalr, CliQr Technologies, Dell, IBM, VMware and Red Hat following successively.
HP Enterprise, BMC and Microsoft filled out the strong contenders.
Define Hybrid Computing
Dave Bartoletti, principal analyst at Forrester and author of this Wave acknowledged the confusion surrounding hybrid cloud computing.
“We have entered phase where every solution is called hybrid cloud. If you had anything that ran outside the data center few years ago you called it a cloud solution. Now everyone’s calling them hybrid cloud solutions,” he said.
The problem is that hybrid cloud computing can be a whole bunch of different things to different people, which is where the confusion arises, he continued.
Very few people turn to Forrester asking specifically for hybrid solutions, instead asking for advice on solutions that can help them manage environments that are split between their own data centers and a public cloud such as Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). So how does Forrester define hybrid cloud computing? Bartoletti explained:
“Forrester takes the simple approach that hybrid cloud is ‘cloud plus anything.’ So it could be cloud plus another cloud. Hybrid could be when it [the organization] wants to use AWS but also wants to use Azure. Hybrid could be when the organization wants to use new elastic applications in the public cloud, but wants to leave the data for that application in the data center. Hybrid cloud is when organizations deploy two different components of an application in two different places.”
So if an organization uses cloud computing for part of its computing needs, it’s a hybrid cloud.
“The reason hybrid is so important now is that applications are far more hybrid than they have ever been before. Your development teams are building applications where the components live in a whole different bunch of places and that’s creating an entirely different and new level of complexity,” Bartoletti said.
“Every time we move things apart we create IT management complexity. What we are seeing is that the use of public clouds is growing quickly. On top of that lots of companies say they have a private cloud strategy so it’s only going to get worse.”
Bartoletti added that Forrester research reports almost 30 percent of IT infrastructure workers already supporting public cloud, almost a third supporting some kind of private cloud and almost half saying that building an internal private cloud is a priority.
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SOURCE: CMS Wire
David Roe
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