It’s startling that in today’s volatile environment Gartner is prescribing such a high risk strategy. Building your own datacentre means (cost of datacentre aside) having the skills in-house to ensure best of breed networking, security, database, and information management. This is a broad set of skills to have when companies need to focus on their core IP and R&D. Also, once these investments are committed, there is little flexibility if clouds are on the horizon.

Should we not be considering a middle way that enables the best of both worlds, and a less risky scenario?

The concept of a shared platform, or Hybrid Cloud, represents the ability for enterprises that outsource to have mobility of workload from their own datacenter to a shared Cloud-based service, to enable them to take advantage of outsourcing, but in a controlled environment. This is not a ‘one size fits all’ model, but a model that enables companies to partially outsource those infrastructures and applications it makes economic sense to put into a Cloud environment, or hosted datacentre.

Key to the Hybrid Cloud model and workload mobility is the ability for customers to have a single management and monitoring view of the full estate, no matter where or how it is deployed. So not outsourcing or outsourcing’s sake but from a Capex, Opex, resource flexibility and management point of view, this hybrid model allows for an organisation to benefit from a pragmatic outsourcing or hosting partnership. It provides a reassuring control and visibility of the estate and its assets for optimum management of business operations, both in-house and via a hosting partnership.

Surely we should not be so prescriptive in our approach and look for more pragmatic solutions.