Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Putting the Evolution of the Data Center in Perspective

No company can hope to create a streamlined and efficient hybrid cloud environment with a traditional siloed data center structure. Establishing an environment to support these new and emerging business models doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a road map and successful planning between IT and business. Each company starts from a different place and has a unique set of business objectives that will impact the route they follow. For example, a mid-size company may move fairly quickly from an internal server environment to implement SaaS and BPaaS in addition to a private cloud. On the other hand, a large enterprise in a highly regulated industry that supports a highly complex traditional data center may need to focus on streamlining its environment prior to implementing cloud technology. This section illustrates what companies with a traditional data center are facing as they begin to rethink the data center.

How siloed IT environments developed

The early data centers had a pretty straightforward role and architecture. These data centers were designed and built to support custom-built enterprise transactional applications. Typically, a single hardware architecture and a single operating system included all the security, systems management, networking, and middleware. The environment was complex and sophisticated, but it was designed to support the intended workloads quite nicely. Then everything changed in the 1980s, when ...