As more and more organizations venture out and begin to explore the use of cloud services, unless you are a start-up, like is the case in Startups, cloud computing, and the freedom to innovate by Mike Kavis, you will need to determine how to handle and integrate on-premise legacy data and systems with cloud based solutions and services.
Another aspect of the cloud is the integration between clouds. If one has their primary operations using the Amazon cloud and does their disaster recovery using say the Rackspace Cloud, then there must be integration between the two in order to make the synchronization easier and maybe even automated.
The emphasis on a hybrid cloud model came to light this week with the IBM announcement on Monday, at the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas, that is was acquiring Integration-as-a-Service provider Cast Iron Systems.
There has been much industry, analyst, buzz around this acquisition and it seems to be mostly good. Such analysts as Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates and Dana Gardner, principal analyst, Interarbor Solutions, LLC were quoted by Jack Vaughan, editor of SearchSOA.com and ebizQ.net, as saying:
“Cast Iron gives IBM a great set of services for integration between clouds and between clouds and on-premise applications” and “IBM middleware is integration but it is not integration as a service. That is why the Cast Iron purchase is complementary” respectively.
I can see the financial, health care, and government sectors signing up to the hybrid approach due to their privacy and security concerns as well as simply the sure immense amount of legacy systems and data stores. We will have to see where this acquisition leads the leaders in such sectors as they consider migrating to and integrating with cloud based solutions.
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