IT is headed down a path in which computing resources and services come from a variety of providers, both internal and external. To the degree this statement was ever especially controversial, it no longer is—outside of a few outliers. But a hybrid future begs the question of how to get started today. The consumption of public cloud resources, whether in an ad-hoc way or in a more governed fashion, offers one such path. And, indeed, the availability of operating systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which offers the same consistent supported environment on everything from physical servers to public clouds, means that even production workloads can portably move from on-premise to public cloud providers.
However, purely incremental approaches work less well within on-premise IT environments. Simply extending an existing virtualization environment really just extends one existing data center silo.
A private cloud that’s designed with hybrid in mind—in part by taking advantage of open technologies and their associated communities—offers an effective approach today as well as a path for the future. Furthermore, thinking about this new cloud initiative in “cloud” terms puts you in the right mindset.
A private cloud makes your IT organization into a service provider for your users. It forces you to think like and be competitive with external service providers, which you need to be if you’re going to succeed. This means self-service, streamlined resource delivery, and the speed and flexibility offered by the best public clouds. Without those, your initiative will fail.
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