Enterprises are now exploring the ways in which they can take advantage of the cloud’s key benefits – whether that’s elasticity, flexibility, portability or simply being able to consume services within a certain ecosystem. “I think that leads to a whole load of interesting possibilities, especially in the sense of what workloads can be brought to cloud and what kind of transformation is needed – from designer architecture all the way to management and security,” said Bala Rajaraman, CTO and Fellow at IBM. “So we’re getting a much more varied conversation.”
Robinson drew parallels with the early days of the internet: “If you look back, we had intranet, extranet, public internet and then, all of a sudden, there was a rally around a set number of standards and it just became the internet. I think we’re seeing the same thing with the cloud as well, with rally points such as Linux, Docker and Kubernetes, which are now supported by most of the major vendors for the orchestration and management of containers. It is simply becoming one cloud.”
Aside from ‘born-on-the-cloud companies’, most organisations are faced with a choice. But it’s no longer a case of whether or not a company should adopt cloud: it’s a question of when, how and with whom. This transition – which inevitably requires enterprises to transform their business processes – doesn’t simply happen overnight. This is where hybrid cloud comes in.