Modern executives define hybrid as crossing the chasm

Art of the Cloud

What is Hybrid Cloud?

“Hybrid cloud lets traditional OT companies and startups leapfrog the complexities of IoT’s advancements by offering access to composable innovation from multiple public and industry cloud platforms—without requiring new skills and tech ramp-up in-house.”

“The key to hybrid cloud is understanding the requirements of your particular application of service because this will drive its composition. Hybrid clouds may coalesce and then evaporate when they’re no longer needed. When harnessed the way I’ve drawn, the combinatorial explosion becomes a cloud cornucopia of growth and abundance for your company.”

“Hybrid forces execs to understand and compile the composite pieces that make up their workload across a distributed environment—from orchestration to database.”

“In 2010, cloud was popular with high-tech Silicon Valley types, but most enterprises weren’t ready to adopt the technology. PaaS wasn’t quite real yet and hybrid cloud was mostly a theory. Today, almost every enterprise has a cloud strategy, looks to PaaS for rapid and consistent deployment, and is building a hybrid cloud.”

“Hybrid cloud gives an IT organization the best of both worlds, using both on-premises and off-premises infrastructure for IT services. Hybrid isn’t about extending on-premises infrastructure to an off-premises infrastructure of the same provider. It’s about leveraging infrastructure from different providers.”

“Moving to a hybrid cloud environment empowers enterprise IT to evolve into a business-aligned service orientation, rather than needing to devote resources to specific technology domains. This creates value by putting resources and attention directly on business challenges, rather than on underlying technology challenges.”

“Hybrid cloud has three domains operating under the management of completely different organizations—evidenced here in its role in the Internet of Things. The source gathers data and transmits it to the public cloud, which then fans in the data, sorting out what’s necessary. And the premise or in-house cloud analyzes the data, closing loop management and automation.”

“If you have volatile traffic or seasonal surges, you will need extra capacity to handle that traffic. Maintaining extra in-house capacity for occasional peaks can be costly and still may not provide enough room for growth.

‘Hulking up’ is about being able to spawn more on-demand capacity in public clouds and using it to get through traffic peaks without service issues.”

Founder and CEO, Cloudsoft Corporation@duncanjw

VP Business Development, M2Mi Corporation@SMC_on_IoT

Co-founder & CTO, Akasia @gthockchom

Senior Director, Gigaom Research@CloudOfCaroline

Technology Fellow, Battery Ventures@adrianco

CTO, CMI Inc.

CEO, Telematica@rhm2k

CEO, Ustream Inc. @bhunstable

Sarah Cooper, PhD

Duncan Johnston-Watt

Gautam Thockchom

Caroline McCrory

Adrian Cockcroft

John Wondolowski

Rich Miller

Brad Hunstable

Two horses, a chasm, and the Hulk. We asked nine cloud aficionados to illustrate what hybrid cloud means to them. The answer was clear—no two visions of the hybrid cloud are the same. Explore our exhibit of masterfully hand-drawn hybrid cloud interpretations below. You may even be inspired to

make your own.

CEO, Basho Technologies @adamjwray

Adam Wray

Hybrid cloud is

RidingRoman

So what does hybrid cloud mean to you?Get crazy. Get creative. Get a pencil and paper and visualize your own hybrid cloud interpretation. And share your sketch of your hybrid cloud on IBM Cloud’s Facebook page.

Need some ideas to spark your imagination?

Steps to Cloud Expertise can help you get started.