David Akka Blog

Freedom Through The Hybrid Cloud

2009 was definitely the year of cloud-education, although many companies are still prudent to act on the cloud. This prudence is born from a number of issues, such as where to start, security risks, organization readiness and lack of standards and industry consensus. We also learned that some enterprises see the utilization of cloud environments verses their own internal environments as an "either or" concept. However, this does not necessarily need to be the case. For many companies the number one reason for moving to the cloud is for economic benefit. Other reasons such as, simplicity, connectivity with remote users, elasticity and flexibility definitely dominate the discussion.

We see companies trying to benefit from some of the above in the form of their own "private clouds". What most have not considered is that a hybrid-cloud approach can also contribute and help them to achieve these benefits, regardless of whether we look at private or public clouds. We see more and more companies talking about private clouds, which in essence is nonsense; why is this? Because the whole point of a cloud is to consume services rather than own and maintain infrastructure, in much the same way we do when consuming utilities. This has taught us about companies' attitudes and concerns with regard to cloud technologies. On the one hand they want to take advantage of as many cloud benefits as they can, but without putting their businesses at risk and therefore; owning part of the solution.

 

So what do we mean by a hybrid model? This is the ability to create enterprise business applications that span across both on-premise infrastructure and cloud infrastructures (regardless of whether this is private or public) and without the need to worry about how to create such solutions. This enables companies that are not yet entirely comfortable keeping their "crown jewels" on a public cloud, to start immediately benefiting from all other areas of the cloud that they are willing to embrace. As time passes and confidence builds these companies will be able to transfer more and more of their business logic, with relative ease, to the cloud.

In 2009 we spoke with many CTOs, IT Managers and ISVs, and were invited to demonstrate and pilot this concept to them. Most of whom were keen on the idea of developing applications on platforms that can be deployed both on-premise and off-premise, or in combinations of both. One such example of this that we are currently investigating for one of our prospects is, taking their invoicing model for their Accounting package (create invoice, print invoice, amend invoice and so on) into the cloud. This allows their salesforce and administration teams to work remotely from home or on mobile devises, but also keeps their General Ledger model, forecasting and reconciliation within the safety of the enterprise.

We also found another interesting aspect of the hybrid model that many customers, such as banks, local governments, the NHS and so on, need because of their regulatory, compliance and governance requirements. Some organizations are required by law to own, manage and maintain the data repository of their solutions due to regulatory standards, such as data protection, Basel II and so on. By providing a solution that allows them to put their entire application logic on the cloud while keeping all the database on-premise, within the concept of a data vault, accessed by secure VPN links from the application platform proves to be the only solution that meets their needs and requirements.

Magic Software's uniPaaS Application Platform allows organizations to develop enterprise business solutions that can span between on-premise, off-premise, desk-top and mobile devises without the need to worry about which bits go where and provides the flexibility and functions to each of the environments at any given time. For example, when designing and deploying the solution there is no need to pre-determine what runs where. uniPaaS enables organizations that have current software development needs, to start building applications without the need to worry about how to deploy and can therefore make the decision to move to the cloud when they are ready.