The Cloud has been forefront in our minds for the past several years. What started as a friction-free solution to all our problems and some of the most tortured metaphors in recent marketing history has gotten a lot more realistic as of late.
For those of you paying attention, the Cloud has picked up an interesting adjective. Now, it’s the “Hybrid Cloud,” with “hybrid” here standing for any number of things, from a mixed facilities-based deployment to a public/private Cloud offering to all the above.
We applaud this disruption. It shows what we’ve known all along: That there is no magic solution. The key to success, now and when we began in this business seventeen years ago, is listening to customers and using the most current hardware and software to get as close to what the customer needs as possible.
Charlie Babcock, one of our favorite infrastructure reporters, has an interesting piece from Cloud Connect last week. Apparently developers, in their age-old battle against IT, have been bypassing normal (read: “slow”) procurement processes in favor of quick Cloud instances.
We don’t condone such shenanigans. But we understand how they arise. To us, the solution is not just to go rogue with Cloud, but to work with the right IT folks to create an on-demand Cloud infrastructure. We don’t know about you, but it always gives us a kick to discover how people are actually using technology, as opposed to how the marketing folks want us to use it.
In any case, that Babcock piece over at InfoWeek makes for informative reading. Along with the latest in the Developers vs. Hardware Engineers Wars, it includes Cloud projections for the coming year. Also for you unfamiliar with this conflict between Developers and Hardware of which we speak, you should have a look at Phil Koblence’s column on the subject over at TheWHIR.
