Yousef Khalidi: Hybrid model combines public and private clouds: Some of what you want to keep within your own walls for privacy and some public.

• Age of company and size of portfolio are correlating factors in which kind of cloud they should use.

David Shacochis:  There’s only so much you can solve in the public cloud. Enterprises have moved from “What is cloud” to “what is our cloud strategy”.

• Software companies are using cloud as a digital supply chain; using cloud to instantiate new versions of that service.
• Customers are broadening the term of cloud to not my data center.

David Nelson: There’s also the community cloud– the country club model of cloud computing. You have to be invited to participate.

Simon Aspinall: Security and compliance initially held cloud back. Now, those can be addressed.

• Public clouds are considered no performance guaranteed, but that’s really falling down now with new technologies that prevent downtime.

One of the dominant themes so far at Fire13 has been the necessity to break down silos in science and technology to achieve greater visibility which in turn drives greater innovation. For my Hybrid Cloud Panel tomorrow afternoon I think I will introduce the “Why Hybrid Cloud Will Win” panel by talking about how CxOs should tackle the balancing act between functional yet outdated silos and tools and innovation occurring at an even faster pace.

Someone just asked the data visualization panel a great question: “how do I control private data I’m sharing on public (cloud) projects?” The implications of the question from an IT perspective take us directly into the hybrid cloud model and the discussion Rajeev has initiated on hybrid cloud authentication services, and the need to extend data center control into the cloud.

I’ll be speaking at Red Herring Americas event later this week.

This is the second award win in two weeks so I apologize if I sound redundant. My presentation at Red Herring this week will be about disrupting traditional IT silos with new ways of migrating, protecting and scaling traditional data center applications in hybrid cloud environments

That’s right; we address the 90%+ of traditional data center apps and services that have not yet been deployed in the cloud. And we do it with full spectrum automation of the hybrid cloud services. No one else automates as many critical processes for cloud migration, cloud-enabled disaster recovery and cloud-enabled software development (or cloud devtest).

No specialized networking, cloud, storage, etc. skills required. Think true hybrid cloud automation. We also eliminate virtualization vendor lock-in, because we work with both physical and virtual environments. We can take private and public cloud to the next level by enabling hybrid cloud operating models.

Congrats to the CloudVelocity team!

I heard “Pretenders and Contenders” from a highly respected cloud platform co-founder who we met earlier in May, when we were discussing cloud migration toys. It might be aptly applied to the hybrid cloud hype billowing in the news.

That is why I am particularly interested in CloudVelocity CEO Rajeev’s latest blog “Hybrid Cloud Services – The Final Frontier,” which was just posted last week. It makes the case that a hybrid cloud simply doesn’t exist without critical hybrid cloud services connecting the data center and the cloud. Those services include the LDAP, Active Directory and authentication services (mentioned previously) that most enterprise IT architects will want to keep on premise but are required for effective security and control within IaaS. These services are, therefore, critical hybrid cloud tethers. Without them, hybrid cloud is just another term; a particular uninteresting term at that.

Compare that perspective to the slew of pretender announcements and solutions which promise some movement of an image of an app from one isolated data center environment to an isolated cloud environment, with no service integration.

Seamless agility is the future of computing. It requires service integration.

The good news: as I mentioned in my Seeking Alpha column “VMware a Hybrid Cloud Leader,” I think that VMware has been among the most powerful and aggressive champions of the real hybrid cloud as a seamless cloud environment (composed of both a data center and IaaS). They are helping to clear the air of hybrid cloud pretenders by articulating an unambiguous vision of the most powerful (and real) hybrid cloud operating model.

On another front Rajeev spoke recently in the Lightning Round at TiEcon 2013 after CloudVelocity was announced as a 2013 TiEcon Lightning Round Winner.

This week Rajeev will be speaking at the Red Herring Top 100 competition (since CloudVelocity was recently announced as a Red Herring Top 100 Finalist). I will be moderating a Why Hybrid Cloud Will Win panel at Future in Review 2013 with execs from Boeing, Microsoft, Savvis, Virtustream and VMware.

Most of the apps are small apps that have been virtualized and migrated into just another form of isolation, this time on a public cloud. An entire cottage industry of firms employed by enterprises to manage the manual processes, costs and risks of cloud migration has emerged, because traditional cloud migration tools require extensive expertise and manual processes, don’t really migrate an app into the cloud and/or require virtualization vendor lock-in for cloud deployment.

Imagine migrating from your data center via a service that not only requires you to be locked-in to a vendor’s platform and then also be stuck on yet another vendors IaaS. This is perhaps why very few enterprises have deployed larger, existing multi-tier apps on public clouds. In exchange for agility to surrender the control required to be agile in the first place.

That is why hybrid cloud services are critical for enterprises looking to deploy apps in the public cloud.

Traditional cloud migration tools typically do not adequately blueprint and replicate critical hybrid cloud services like LDAP, Active Directory and authentication. Yet if you cannot securely extend these services into the cloud, the cloud won’t be a seamless extension of your data center. Your apps will be isolated on yet another island, while others develop seamless agility, resilience and scaling between the data center and IaaS. See Greg’s blog on: The Cloud Migration Gap.

Our ability to blueprint and provision these critical services is likely the key reason we were selected as a TiEcon 2013 Lightning Round Winner. We are disrupting dozens of tools, toys and processes once required to deploy a multi-tier physical app in a hybrid cloud operating model. Panos did a great job articulating the power of this new model in his blog on: The Power of Hybrid Cloud Deployment.

Try us out and discover the power of being in control of your apps in the cloud.

Here is the TiEcon 2013 announcement in its entirety.

Why CloudVelocity Won

Our unique approach to hybrid cloud deployment is transforming the way that public clouds can be used for disaster recovery, agile software development and cloud bursting.

We support existing, mix of physical and virtual environments, multi-tier apps, the kinds of environments that the traditional cloud deployment solutions tend to avoid. We reduce the risk, time and expense required to deploy these Windows and Linux apps into public Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, such as Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure.

CloudVelocity also enhances security and control in the cloud. We are the only automated cloud migration solution that integrates critical hybrid cloud services (including LDAP, Active Directory and authentication) so that clouds can be deployed as seamless extensions of data centers for increased agility, resilience and scalability. We also eliminate virtualization vendor lock-in, because we work with both physical and virtual environments.

Congrats to the CloudVelocity team!

To check out the full list of Lightning Round Winners, visit tiecon.org/content/announcing-the-2013-lightning-round-winners

In the financial community (and others responsible for handling massive amounts of transactions and critical supply chain data), the cost of downtime has been well documented and more than justifies the DR investment. Outages are often more costly in terms of lost revenue, brand erosion and employee productivity. So DR is like a kind of insurance policy, except instead of a policy-holder getting compensated for a loss the policy-holder instead maintains two (or more) of everything. That is perhaps not the most efficient use of high cost IT assets as well as the energy used to power them.

The cloud’s pay as you go model is a much more efficient model for the occasional use dynamics of disaster recovery. Yet that has yet to happen, at least for traditional multi-tier enterprise apps.

The public cloud has not evolved sufficiently to support the specialized service integration and controls required for recovery time and recovery point objectives; and the private cloud is simply a way for enterprises to maintain a duplicate app and service infrastructure more efficiently, albeit while paying a virtualization vendor for the right to do so.

That is why I’m convinced that the hybrid cloud is an ideal operating model for disaster recovery. That is, a hybrid cloud that is a seamless extension of the data center. For small and medium-sized enterprises that simply cannot afford enterprise-class disaster recovery or larger enterprises that want a more efficient or supplemental level of protection, the hybrid cloud is the optimum operating model. Pay as you go for DR gives them both incentives to reduce downtime and the ability to invest in greater IT innovation.

Yet many executives, pros and vendors are trapped in an outdated notion of a hybrid cloud as two distinct clouds (private and public) with some fundamental app migration capabilities shared between them. That definition would not support the requirements for enterprise-grade disaster recovery. For aggressive RTOs and RPOs the hybrid cloud needs to be a seamless extension of the data center, including services like authentication, LDAP and Active Directory. It needs to support physical and virtual apps and be operating beyond the grip of virtualization or service provider lock-in.

When enterprises truly understand the power of a hybrid cloud operating model and how to deploy it, disaster recovery will be transformed into a more effective, efficient and powerful way to protect critical applications.

That definition of a hybrid cloud isn’t particularly powerful or even interesting. At best it is confusing and shortsighted. Personally I like what VMware has been saying about hybrid cloud (from www.v3.co.uk):

“We think you should be looking at using public cloud as a natural extension of your own data centre. It should be free and easy to move workloads between those clouds as it is to move them from one rack to another in your data centre.” – VMware’s Joe Baguley quoted at VMware Forum in London.

If public clouds become a natural extension of the data center, then there will be truly massive increases in application agility, resilience and scalability. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger hinted to the massive payoff in London’s The Telegraph just a few hours ago: Firms Must Ride (Cloud) Wave or Be Swept Away.

Yet most enterprises treat their cloud environments like islands that are easier to enter than to leave, hence my earlier blog: The Cloud Migration Gap and a 60s Castaway Comedy. Without seamless integration the notion of a hybrid cloud is trivial at best. Let’s join with VMware and simply agree that a hybrid cloud is a single cloud, not two clouds strapped together for a minimal payoff.

That is why I think that cloud migration and integration may be the most substantial components of the critical gap between the two cloud operating model and the true hybrid cloud, a seamless integration between physical data center and various (and evolving) forms of IaaS. Now it is time for the plethora of cloud migration vendors and solutions to evolve and embrace the hybrid cloud that VMware has so carefully and forcefully articulated.