by Nancy Owano

Created on: June 30, 2010

Ten years ago, if an IT manager told coworkers he was into hybrid clouds, HR might have sent him a memo to say that alcohol was prohibited in the workplace. Today he might get an email from the CEO asking him to report on what hybrid clouds can do for the business.

Welcome to the world of cloud computing, the latest buzzword in IT circles and for good reason. In the cloud-computing approach, a business moves its computer systems over to an off-site data center where applications are offered back as a service. It's an on-demand Internet environment and it sounds like a solution made in heaven.

After all, there's no more overheated server rooms to worry about. No more sullen help-desk staff to rankle business managers' feathers. There is all that reduced cost in computing infrastructure. So why haven't all companies signed up?

 Reality check: Some companies are not entirely convinced that this is a solution made in heaven. There is one principal worry that has them puttinng cloud computing on hold: security. Even in computing before clouds came along, security is what kept CIOs up all night, as they were thinking about ways to avert the risks of losing uptime and confidential information to miscreants or server shutdowns beyond their control. A Deloitte senior director was recently quoted as saying, "This concern is only heightened when their data is hosted on a server elsewhere."

One only has to imagine that kind of scenario giving pause to administrators at a hospital or trauma center where medical images and mission-critical medical records, if lost, could cost patients their lives. In a recent survey by the research firm IDC, respondents showed greater concern about security than they did about the benefits of flexibility and lower costs.

Enter hybrid cloud computing. With hybrid as an approach, there is a little bit of this remaining in the company's local data center behind the company's own firewall, and a little bit of that moved over to the off-site cloud computing environment. A company using a hybrid mix of on-premise and off-premise cloud solutions gets it all: security and savings.

Evans Data CEO, Janel Garvin, sees the hybrid cloud as very reasonable in approach, because it provides a gateway to cloud computing yet the business does not need to commit all its resources and does not need to surrender all its control and security to an ourtside vendor.

 According to a recent Evans Data survey, more than 60 percent of IT shops polled plan to adopt a hybrid cloud model over the coming year, but over 87 percent said that half or less then half of their resources will move. Applications considered as suitable to move to cloud sites include standard e-mail, customer relationship management and collaborative software. These are not as mission-critical as the applications that carry private information which the company may see as risky ro move.

Question is, will hybrid cloud computing be THE preferred method of use over the long term or is the hybrid model just a sign of early adoption jitters? Cloud computing is still in its young days and it may be too soon to tell which cloud computing models will become the business standard. But one thing is sure. Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, perhaps says it best: "'Cloud' is the game and 'hybrid' is the name. "

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