Why the future of the cloud is open

Choosing how to build a hybrid cloud is perhaps the most strategic decision IT leaders will make this decade. It is a choice that will determine their organization’s competitiveness, flexibility, and IT economics for the next 10 years.

Public clouds have set the benchmark for on-demand access to resources. But most organizations that use public clouds do so in concert with a variety of on-premise computing resources, albeit modernised and increasingly operated in a manner that provides self-service, dynamic scaling, and policy-based automation. Heterogeneous environments, both public and private, are today’s face of hybrid cloud.

Whatever the optimal mix for a given organisation, a well-planned cloud strategy delivers strategic advantages to the business by redirecting resources from lights-on to innovation. But only an open cloud delivers on the full strategic business value and promise of cloud computing.

By embracing open clouds, organisations ensure that their cloud:
Enables portability of applications and data across clouds.
Fully takes advantage of existing IT investments and infrastructure and avoids creating new silos.
Makes it possible to build a hybrid cloud that spans physical servers, multiple virtualisation platforms, private clouds, and public clouds running a variety of technology stacks.
Provides incremental value as they incrementally add new capabilities.
Puts them in charge of their own technology strategy.