Every single organisation will eventually move to a hybrid cloud model, according to predictions from Virtustream.
Speaking to Cloud Pro at Dell EMC World, the company's COO, Simon Walsh, said: "I think hybrid cloud is the future for every industry, actually ... every industry, every customer."
This trend will be driven, Walsh said, by a desire to take advantage of the flexibility of the public cloud without compromising on the security and reliability of private cloud infrastructure.
"What Virtustream has, which is quite unique, is that we've got public cloud attributes, because we're multi-tenant and... consumption-charging, but we've got private cloud attributes, because we're entirely encrypted, totally secure, and we give a guarantee on IO, and we give a guarantee on SLA."
Walsh also noted that even the most cloud-native of companies have proven they're not averse to pursuing a hybrid model.
"Netflix has a business-critical application, called Netflix. It runs its application in the cloud. But it also does a heap of work to run services and processes on top of some of the public cloud providers it uses to ensure replication, duplication and resiliency, none of which is available from the cloud itself."
In addition to this, Walsh also told Cloud Pro that Virtustream has noticed some customer dissatisfaction with the main public cloud players. "I see a little bit of backlash against some of the public cloud providers," he said, "because they've gone from small sandbox test environments into production, and some of the fees that the customers are experiencing don't quite reflect what their starting experience was."
"I'm also hearing quite a lot about pricing complexity. So, the public cloud providers have so many variations of price that you can be bamboozled by their complexity, and not necessarily get to make any sense as to the invoice you get versus the service you bought. It doesn't directly correlate."
Data protection regulations like GDPR and other measures will also drive a substantial uptick in hybrid cloud investment, he predicted. The need for companies to move their workloads and data to compliant clouds will compel them to make the jump, he said – a similar view to that expressed by the company's converged platforms chief, Chad Sakac, during the conference.
"Certain countries have chosen to issue policy that data cannot leave the country," Walsh said. "That sort of forces hybrid cloud, doesn't it? Because you've got to stay in the physical geography – you're bound by the rules of where the geography finishes, so that would suggest to me that that's forcing people into a hybrid cloud world."
Walsh was quick to point out that cloud doesn't necessarily have to be public in order to be effective. "I think a lot of people say 'cloud equals off-prem'," he said. Echoing a sentiment that Michael Dell himself expressed more than once over the course of the conference, he stated that for Dell EMC, cloud is more akin to a state of mind than anything else.
"Cloud is something you do, not something you buy. It's a way of delivering IT as a service. So when we talk about where should somebody be delivering their mission-critical applications from – from a hybrid cloud, on or off [premises] – the location is not the critical decision-maker."
