Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud - The New Game Changer

The new mantra to the world of Cloud Computing is the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud. With both vertical & horizontal service solution offerings increasing day by day, the cloud adoption question changed from "if" to "when" and more frequently to "NOW!" With time comes maturity and so has the cloud industry matured - organizations are using a mix of Public, Private & the Hybrid cloud offerings. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud offerings for critical business operations from public and private providers, connecting them all back to the core of the business is becoming a challenge involving complicated integration, orchestration, work-flows and business rules management.

Public Cloud refers to a Cloud offering on the Public Network - Amazon EC2, Private Cloud is an internal Cloud offering within an Enterprise and Hybrid Cloud is a mix of Public & Private Clouds. The new game-changer is the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud that refers to multiple clouds integrating with the core as well as other clouds! Each of the cloud offering has to connect back to the business and also integrate with the other clouds in the enterprise. Yes, it can get really complicated.

This shift from "cloud" to "clouds" provides new opportunities for Service Providers, but it also brings new challenges to the Enterprise, beyond just integration-security, data integrity and reliability, and business rules management for business processes that depend on enterprise IT assets composed of one or more services.

Smart organizations need to have a comprehensive vision & an execution plan to integrate on-premise systems & the Hybrid Cloud services with the external cloud offerings without which integrations could become a nightmare! With more & more business functions getting on the cloud solutions independently outside the purview of IT Governance & Control, the end to end business processes are getting cluttered with multiple cloud players & service providers. This is resulting in Enterprise chaos and that's where Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud walks in.

To tackle this, organizations are turning to Cloud Service Brokerages that help to aggregate and orchestrate cloud services, manage the relationships and interdependencies required, leaving the back-end complexity transparent to the Organization. Gartner described just such an example in Case Study: Mohawk Fine Papers Uses a CSB to Ease Adoption of Cloud Computing, released in July 2011. Mohawk chose to work with Liaison, an aggregator and orchestrator of cloud services that was able to manage the relationships and interdependencies required, leaving the back-end complexity transparent to Mohawk. Liaison provides Mohawk with on-premises integration, supply chain integration for its 300 customers and 100 suppliers and other external e-commerce partners and with intermediation of all its third-party cloud services providers. While Liaison focused on the technical implementation of doing that, Mohawk focused on successfully incorporating the external service into its various applications and processes to meet new business requirements.

So friends, Cloud Service Brokerage is the new entrepreneurial opportunity in the Cloud World that is giving a new meaning to the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud!

References to Case Study on Gartner.com and Thor Olavsrud's article on CIO.com