The current fascination with deployment models in the cloud will soon give way to more practical approaches to managing tiers of private and public cloud computing resources.
According to Saar Gillai, senior vice president and general manager for converged cloud at Hewlett-Packard, as cloud computing becomes more unified in the months ahead, thanks largely to open standards and APIs, hybrid clouds will simply become the new enterprise IT norm.
Gillai says all this fascination with deployment models is a temporary thing. In fact, Gillai says the deployment model is not the relevant discussion.
It’s the ability to support multiple deployment models, ranging from public clouds to private clouds running on premise and every type of cloud in between, adds Gillai, which will ultimately distinguish HP from larger cloud rivals such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
As IT organizations begin this journey, Gillai says the goal of moving to the cloud should not be the creation of new silos, but rather the ability to port an application anywhere in the cloud. Today’s cloud environments, contends Gillai, almost always lock the customer into a particular stack. The whole point of moving to the cloud should be nothing less than the democratization of IT, which is why Gillai says initiatives such as OpenStack are so important.
Cloud computing may be the new style of enterprise computing, but Gillai says it’s not a religion. IT organizations are going to have to deal with the same convergence issues that many of them are dealing with inside the data center in terms of unifying the management of IT infrastructure. Otherwise, they will have more, rather than less, trouble trying to manage fragmented workloads across an extended enterprise.
This may lead to a lot of behavioral change across the organization as IT organizations increasingly play the role of broker of internal and external IT services, especially now that IT as a whole is set to be managed at a higher level of abstraction. But Gillai says that no matter how you look at cloud computing, the same basic set of core IT management principles will always be applicable.
