As featured in Acceleration Economy Network

The reality is that only a faction, 15 percent according to AWS, of IT workloads have been migrated to the “cloud” after more than a decade. When we consider industrial or OT workloads, the journey is only beginning, but it is likely that most of this industrial or edge of your business data will continue to reside across the edge.

Hybrid Cloud, the Gateway to Edge Cloud

What is hybrid cloud? It’s the idea of a unified environment of at least one public cloud and one private cloud. Simply put, it’s about integrating and blending a cloud service provider managed environment with an enterprise-managed IT environment or environments.

How did it come about? Well, the big cloud players, in particular IBM, came to a recognition years ago that hybrid cloud is probably the safe bet for the future of enterprise computing. In fact, IBM had and continues to position itself as the “hybrid cloud company” before any of the other big cloud players betting on the thesis that the enterprise would be applying cloud technologies in their data centers and across edge environments.

It appears that they were right. Now everyone from AWS, Microsoft, and Google can’t stop talking about hybrid cloud. 

Thanks to the transition from virtualization to cloud-native architectures as well as fast-maturing cloud management platforms and multi-cloud brokerage tools, cloud computing models are coming to an enterprise data center near you. 

Hybrids cloud is not just stopping at the enterprise data center. It is becoming a thing at the very edge of your business.

The Future of Hybrid Cloud

In the future, we will continue to see the expansion of hybrid cloud across the edge especially as enterprises continue to look for ways to extend their IT environments further out to where their business is happening. That happens to be the edge.

We are seeing hybrid cloud become a very common phrase used in industrial technology or OT world. In fact, much effort is being invested on the security front to make hybrid cloud deployments meet the strict requirements of operational environments such as a plant or warehouse.

It’s inevitable that all the constellation of edge clouds that will populate the edge will be a mix of private and public nodes. The big cloud players are banking heavily on edge computing each with their own offering both public and virtual private. Call it a VPEC or virtual private edge cloud. In many ways, the future of hybrid cloud is already here.

Key Takeaways for the C-Suite

Hybrid cloud is the future of cloud computing. The C-Suite should be clear on what it means when folks say that something is going up to the cloud. The nature of “cloud computing” is constantly changing. Hybrid cloud is an important factor in this ongoing change and spawning new paradigms of edge computing. So next time someone tells you that edge computing is just a fad, tell them, it’s the future of cloud computing.