The embarrassing truth about the hybrid cloud


Lots of up-and-coming technologies have been receiving the media’s attention this year.

Wearable tech promises emails and search capabilities with a glance at our watch or just by uttering the words:  “Google GOOG -0.57% Glass.”  3-D printers will soon be manufacturing parts and clothing in our own factories again instead of China.

Driverless cars may be taking us to our destinations faster someday.  The Internet of Things will give inanimate objects the ability to talk to each other.  All of this is great.  All of this is in the future.

But there’s one new technology that’s real and live and attracting millions in venture capital funding and being utilized by thousands of companies right now.  This same technology has also revealed something embarrassing about the cloud.  It’s that we need a hybrid cloud.

The hybrid cloud is not a household term yet.  But it’s certainly familiar to Silicon Valley investors.  It’s the joining of the cloud and the on-premise office.  Hybrid cloud technologies are enabling users to save and then access their information, be it files, databases, spreadsheets or documents from either a cloud based hosted system or their own internal servers, whichever is faster.

It’s the same information, simultaneously stored in multiple places and designed to be served up immediately to the user depending on where the user is.  The data is stored on a “public” cloud and a “private” cloud.  And it’s big, big business.

… A college kid sits on a train from New York to Boston and catches up on the latest episodes of Walking Dead on her iPad.  It’s glorious.  It’s mind-blogging.  And it’s maddening too. Because with all the hype, with all the excitement, with all the money thrown at it, the cloud has been disappointingly and embarrassingly imperfect.

Yes, I am accessing my customers’ data from 30,000 feet but the connection is so slow and drops so many times that it takes me ten times as long to retrieve the information I’m looking for.

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