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Hybrid models driving business cloud strategies, report says

Hybrid strategies of public and private clouds seem to be catching on with business customers, but which providers will reap the benefits from this trend?
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

Hybrid cloud schemes made up of public and private cloud services might be the way to go these days, based on a new report from cloud management provider RightScale.

Given how much cloud computing has ballooned in the last year, the hybrid trend probably took off because business customers have many more choices than they ever did before.

Thus, RightScale researchers posited that this gives businesses, of all sizes really, the ability to choose from a variety of options to align their cloud strategy with their specific corporate cloud needs.

To determine this, RightScale polled 651 businesses of all sizes from a variety of industries in April and May 2012

At least 68 percent of survey respondents replied that they are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, while slightly more than half (53 percent) of the respondents also said that they are pursuing a hybrid strategy of building out a combination of public and private clouds.

Among the businesses that plan to use both public and private clouds, 55 percent are devoting equal resources to public and private cloud efforts. The remainder was split at 23 percent admitting that they would prioritize their private cloud initiatives while 22 percent opted to prioritize their public cloud initiatives.

Thus, this presents a huge opportunity for cloud solutions providers. What remains to be seen is who will jump on this trend quickly enough.

So far, it looks like the open source cloud crowd might be in the lead. Out of the respondents that plan to use a private cloud option, 41 percent of them are going with open source options from the likes of CloudStack, OpenStack, and Eucalyptus.

VMware seems to be attracting the hybrid cloud set as well being that another 29 percent out of this subgroup are going with another hybrid strategy of open source and VMware solutions. Furthermore, 30 percent of those respondents plan to use VMWare-only based private cloud options.

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