New study points to future interest in hybrid clouds

EMC Corporation has announced the results of an IDC white paper sponsored by EMC: Hybrid cloud on the rise: a key strategy to business growth in Asia Pacific.

The study revealed that 57% of Australian organisations surveyed are already currently using some form of cloud computing, are actively researching and testing cloud services, or are planning to adopt private and/or public cloud services at some point in the next 12 months.

The survey data also suggests that the hybrid or ‘converged’ approach to cloud will be the rule rather than the exception in 2011, as cloud computing gains a bigger foothold across the Asia-Pacific region. As a result, cloud federation between private and public clouds, or between different public clouds, will become increasingly important in 2011 as the cloud model moves into the enterprise.

EMC anticipates hybrid clouds will be the eventual goal of customers once they have advanced on their way to the private cloud, to a point where they can choose what resources they want to manage in house and allow others to be managed externally.

The shift to hybrid clouds is also being accelerated by the needs of some IT departments that have to deal with new ways of building applications to meet the needs of end users who are increasingly turning to smartphone devices and web tablets, while needing to continue supporting core legacy and mission-critical applications.

The IDC survey data suggests that CIOs will view some applications as more suitable for a public cloud - especially when it comes to communication applications, while most enterprises in the region may prefer a private cloud approach for their core systems. IDC also suggests in the near future that private clouds will eventually need the ability to cooperate with other types of clouds.

“Enterprises want the benefits of cloud computing, but in their own terms,” says Steve Leonard, President of EMC Asia Pacific & Japan. “The potential of cloud computing to deliver IT-as-service for the enterprise is clearly there, but for many CIOs, it is also a delicate balance between risk and benefit.

“Trust in the cloud will play a key part for CIOs in determining how much goes on the public cloud, and what stays in the private cloud. The reality is that private and public clouds need to work together, and this requires a converged or hybrid cloud approach.”