Hybrid cloud is driving businesses: report

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 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 per cent of survey respondents replied that they are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, while slightly more than half (53 per cent) 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 per cent are devoting equal resources to public and private cloud efforts. The remainder was split, with 23 per cent admitting that they would prioritise their private cloud initiatives, and 22 per cent opted to prioritise 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 per cent 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, and another 29 per cent out of this subgroup are going with another hybrid strategy of open-source and VMware solutions. Furthermore, 30 per cent of those respondents plan to use VMWare-only-based private cloud options.

Via ZDNet