What does the future hold for cloud computing in 2013? (page 2 of 3)

More than once we've read an IT professional opining in the comments to an article along the lines of "Just you wait. Enterprise IT departments are going to come to their senses and take the iPads out of those darned kids. And get off my lawn." (Or something along those lines.)
The thing is that those "darned kids" probably include the CEO and other executives.

And look around any organisation that's not part of the government or in a highly regulated industry and, chances are, most of the smartphones you see aren't company-issued and provisioned. And the tablets that you probably spy as well are far more commonly purchased by employees for some combination of personal and work use—to the degree that we can even still draw a sharp line between such spheres of activity in general. Bring-your-own-PC is a more complicated issue, for a variety of reasons, but PCs are being "consumerised" as well.

In most cases, BYOD is going to require IT departments to do some combination of rolling out new products, educating users and adopting new processes. At the very least, they need to understand potential exposures and come up with a plan for dealing with them. But just saying "no" isn't a realistic option for the large majority of organisations. And that means acceptance is the only reasonable path forward.

Hybrid shows up in ever more conversations

IT consumerisation is also one component (though only a component) of another cloud computing trend—hybrid cloud computing. Hybrid commonly refers to cloud management that spans both on-premise (or dedicated resources at a hosting provider) and multi-tenant public clouds—although clouds can be heterogeneous in other ways as well.

The consumerisation angle is that early public cloud usage was often characterized by users gaining access to computing resources with a credit card because their IT department wasn't moving quickly enough. Such usage can also be outside the scope of any IT governance practices. That can be good for flexibility and speed but it can have a stark downside if there's a data breach or if an application developed using a public cloud can't be easily put into production on-premise.

The idea behind a hybrid cloud is that resources can be made available to users as easily as if they were accessing a public cloud while keeping the process under centralized policy-based IT management, as you can using Red Hat's CloudForms' open, hybrid cloud management. Organisations are also increasingly looking to hybrid cloud architectures as a way to have a more dynamic computing architecture over time.

There are only a modest number of hybrid computing architectures in production today, but the movement towards hybrid is clear. That's why industry analysts such as Gartner are recommending that organisations "design private cloud deployments with interoperability and future hybrid in mind." Expect to hear even more about hybrid clouds in the coming year.

OpenStack demonstrates the power of community innovation

Openness is one of the most important enablers of hybrid IT because it helps users avoid lock-in to vendors and specific ecosystems. And not just open source but openness across multiple dimensions including APIs, standards and the the requirement that permission to use intellectual property, like copyrights and patents, must be granted in ways that make the technology open and accessible to the user. Openness is also about having vibrant, upstream communities that are at the heart of the innovation that the open source development model makes possible.

The OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) project is a great example of community-driven development.