Hybrid clouds can deliver digital Britain

Public versus private cloud is not the point, says Alec Selvon-Bruce

Alec Selvon-Bruce: Hybrid clouds could help deliver digital Britain

Last year’s ‘Digital Britain’ report failed to address how the UK would cope with faster broadband and more internet traffic. The industry needs to address this challenge head on.

Building new datacentres is not the answer. The IT industry should be optimising existing datacentres and doing more with less, using cloud computing.

We have already seen public sector plans to launch the G-cloud. We believe that cloud computing in government should use hybrid public and private clouds.

Public clouds provide services over the internet, often creating an illusion of infinite resources available on demand for low investment. However, security risks and lack of data visibility may make public cloud unsuitable for some uses.

Private clouds are typically hosted and managed services based on niche application services. External private content clouds cab store lots of content distributed or virtualised from regional datacentres.

Hybrid clouds integrate private hosting clouds with private internal clouds, or private internal clouds with external content clouds.

Private cloud components may sit within the company’s firewall, while external cloud components are outside the firewall on multi-tenant infrastructure.

Hybrid clouds can offer ‘plug and play’ functionality delivering content via new platforms or applications.

This will enable channel partners and resellers to evolve into ‘cloud orchestraters’, helping integrate private and public cloud providers. Channel partners should be looking to up-sell products with application management capabilities and deep technology infrastructure.

Alec Selvon-Bruce is EMEA business consultant for next-generation datacentres and eco-solutions at Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)