An entire industry of cloud-related consultants and service professionals has grown up in a few short years, empowered by the complex and risky process of cloud migration, or the moving of an application and its services from a fixed data center to a (fixed) cloud.  The meteoric rise of public cloud has generated remarkable commercial interest, especially for smaller businesses that can leverage the cloud for agility and cost savings versus building out their own dedicated infrastructure.

And cloud migration was a natural first generation solution. After all, most apps existed in physical data centers before the rise of the cloud.  Over time larger enterprises started to look into cloud migration as well because they could achieve increased scale and agility for select apps and services.

Last year I was able to talk to infrastructure execs at some leading companies who were moving off of the cloud and developing hybrid cloud operating models leveraging large, highly efficient wholesale data centers linked to AWS.  The reason was simple for all of them: at a certain point it became much cheaper to operate their own data center versus lease cloud capacity full time. In those days I called their models private clouds because I couldn’t understand how any apps could run seamlessly between a data center and a cloud (in a hybrid model).

I wrote about it last June in: private-clouds-and-the-500kw-threshold:

This 500kW threshold has been brought up by two of our customers as the point where they could get significant returns by taking greater control of not just IT customization and optimization but also greater customization of the electrical and mechanical infrastructure of their data center facility.  A more energy efficient data center can translate into millions of dollars in electricity cost savings per year, not to mention a reduced carbon footprint.

In addition, wholesale data center developers are moving to increased levels of customization, allowing enterprises to get the control they want, yet with lower risk, lower energy costs and more predictable cost models.

This was, of course, before I saw the CloudVelocity (then Denali Systems in stealth mode) live demo featuring a multi-tier app operating across a colocation site and Amazon AWS (in less than an hour with the press of a few buttons and a few icons dragged and dropped) while maintaining data center services integrity. The demo generated a kind of epiphany for me that led to my latest stream of hybrid cloud blog posts here and at my personal blog and elsewhere.

Ultimately, enterprises will choose hybrid cloud integration over merely being stuck in a single provider’s cloud or even zone.

If you would like to get briefed on our perspective on hybrid clouds and view a live demo, you can email us at info@cloudvelocity.com. We are busy delivering demos almost every day, but I’m convinced that what you will see will certainly be worth any wait.