CEO Blogs

Reading a service-level agreement (SLA) may be as exciting as watching paint dry — but when it comes to creating a hybrid that fits your organization and truly meets its needs, bringing your full attention to your SLA can make all the difference.

So here’s my version of Hybrid Cloud 101:

Expect to customize your hybrid cloud SLA . The whole point of a private cloud is to design and customize cloud capabilities to address your unique needs, and you need a Cloud services provider willing and able to do that in ways that precisely reflect your business requirements so you can achieve the flexibility, scalability, cost reductions, efficiencies, redundancy, and disaster recovery protections you need — without overspending on overcapacity.

As you spend more and more time using Cloud-delivered services , applications, and data, odds are you’ll end up interested in a hybrid Cloud environment that can be deployed in ways that quite specifically meet your organization’s needs, both business-wise and budget-wise.

If your experience has been limited to public Clouds, you’ll need to tread carefully into the realm of hybrids because, by definition, hybrid Clouds are customized. Very quickly, you’ll come to understand that the success of your hybrid Cloud greatly depends on its customizer.

In a recent post, I focused on market research about the use of Cloud computing , notably the eager and stunningly widespread embrace of SaaS and PaaS .

This time, I want to take a look at another key Cloud computing trend— the rise of hybrid Cloud computing. The North Bridge Venture Partners’ 2012 report reinforces this:

A mobile workforce may sound great in principle , but I’ve heard plenty of concern from managers about how well an untethered workforce will really perform.

I haven’t seen anything in the way of a rigorous, real-world, before-and-after study that shows, one way or the other, whether mobility aids or detracts from workers’ productivity and effectiveness. Which means that for now anecdotal evidence will have to do.

Sleek new devices like the mini iPad and Windows Surface promise to add even more momentum to the already headlong rush into business mobility and BYOD that will, according to market researcher IDC , have more U.S. Internet users accessing the Internet through mobile devices by 2015 than through PCs or other wireline devices.

And it’s all made possible by Cloud computing infrastructure, without which business mobility would remain a hassled tangle of siloed applications, data, and communications services.