Today, “hybrid cloud” is all about bursting across (or migrating across, or permanently spanning) the boundary between private and public pools of resources. If your organization uses or builds clouds, it’s likely you’ll be thinking about hybrid sooner or later.
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However, I want to suggest that we enlarge our vision of what can be hybridized.
Right now, BYOD (bring your own device) is an IT issue mostly because of mobile–employees want to use their own smart phone rather than move to company resources. However, I predict that the same phenomenon will eventually manifest for other types of hardware as well–right up to big iron.
I once worked for a senior VP who became so frustrated with central IT red tape that he went out and contracted with an independent SAS 70 datacenter to host a handful of servers. He had the budget for it, and he figured he’d get forgiveness later from the CIO. I asked him if he thought he’d be forced to migrate into the “official internal cloud” at some point. He shrugged. “If I have to do on-premises, I’ll move hardware in-house. But it’ll be in my closet, not the datacenter. IT can remote in and manage it, run its policies about patch and whatever. But I get to flip the power switch, add disk if I want, and use all its horsepower myself.”
Perhaps you think this executive is an outlier. But I suspect we’ll see department-level BYOD around NAS, print, and other commodity resources in increasing quantities. This will be driven by a decentralization trend tied to outsourcing, contractors, and loose confederations of business units.
Consider the implications. Instead of thinking of a cloud as a pool of resources wholly owned and managed–in every respect–by a centralized IT staff, we end up with quasi-owned, quasi-managed resources. If IT manages this outside their cloud solution, they are signing up for continual support headaches. But if IT wants to manage it inside their CMP, then the CMP has to be friendly to this new kind of hybridization.
Tell me what you think. Do you believe IT will be able to hold the line and prevent mixed-model thinking from polluting the resources under cloud management? Or is BYOD for non-mobile hardware inevitable?
Is public ~ private the only dimension along which a cloud can be hybridized? Image credit: Sam Johnston (Wikimedia Commons)
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