Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

What Infrastructure as a Service Means to You

Even if you aren’t using IaaS now, it’s very likely that your future hybrid environment will incorporate this practical, flexible, and cost-effective cloud service. What does this mean to you?

Think about how you’re getting your services.

Understand which services include a set of well-defined interfaces and which ones will lock you into a complex set of services that will be difficult to move away from.

Know why you’re using a cloud service. For example, if you need some temporary capacity to test a new application, your requirements will be very different than if you’re creating an application that will operate in a cloud.

In addition to understanding potential cloud gains, become familiar with how your infrastructure service provider handles the following capabilities:

Explicit definitions of service level agreements for availability, support, and performance (of provisioning more resource)

A utility computing billing arrangement, ...