With public and private cloud evangelists’ alternate views of cloud computing still to be realised, the reality lies somewhere in the middle – the hybrid cloud.
Security concerns mean that large corporations remain reluctant to put all their eggs– or even their mission critical applications – into one publicly-hosted basket. Conversely, the cost of building and maintaining your own infrastructure for hosting everything is a luxury very few can afford.
That leaves the third way: mixing the two environments and matching applications to the domain that best suits.
Cheap, cheerful and less risky stuff can ‘busk it’ on the public internet.
Mission critical software that is the equivalent of a company’s crown jewels stays behind the company firewall.
However, there’s still a big job of gluing the two domains together, especially for those companies ambitious enough to want to offer a seamless experience to users dipping into the two.
Network Manager These people are on the frontline when it comes to migrating applications to the cloud, says Cloud Technical Leader for IBM UK & Ireland, John Easton: “We worked with a client recently who wanted to put an email system in the public cloud. You may think an email system is fairly stand-alone, but actually it has to link to the directory, be synched with security policies and privileges and with distribution lists – these don’t exist for emails alone”.
Main skills needed: TCP/IP is the main networking protocol governing transport issues.
IT Services Manager Service management is a vital tech role in any organisation investing in the cloud, particularly when internal and external versions are involved. “Depending upon the business priorities of the organisation, the service manager may wish to manage to performance, availability and cost – although usually a balance has to be kept between the three factors”, says Easton. The scope of service management includes anticipating business needs, service portfolio management, service life cycle management, service operation and continuous improvement.
Main skills: ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is the industry standard for practitioners.
Developer Developer activity depends on what stage in the stack you are in your cloud development. If it’s still the provision of infrastructure and virtual machines, there’s not a lot of call for developers to get involved. Move up a couple of layers in the stack to platform service or software as a service and developers get busier. As IBM’s Easton reports, “We’ve had partners develop our Lotus Live product to write to make these features available as a service. Application development for Cloud is real and happening”.
Main skills: There isn't really a single or even multiple programming languages for cloud. You can write in pretty much any language depending upon where in the stack you are implementing your application.
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