I read Kip Compton's thoughts today on the Amazon S3 Outage.  As Kip indicated: public cloud is here to stay. No one will stop using public cloud services, as those services will remain as a primary building block of every DC business plan.

The S3 outage didn't last long, but it intensified the need to have a clear cloud strategy that takes technological aspects and users' needs and desires into consideration.

Here are a typical Cloud challenges for our customers:

Managing the cloud is hard. Public cloud vendors will try to convince you to put all your assets on their platform by promising agility, lower prices, better security and so on.

On the other hand, continuing to build new data centers is not an option either.  Some DC just don't have what is needed to support a next generation ASAP Data Center.

And their IT teams are facing tremendous pressure to ramp up new solutions to support business needs.

The sense that hybrid cloud is going to lead cloud strategy plans got an extra boost from recent Forbes Insights research:

Here are the Top 3 challenges IT faces when changing Clouds:

1. Deciding the application location

2. Empowering LoB & app. Developers

3. Mitigating risks

First, it's about determining whether the application site itself should be- on-prem, public private or managed. Should I build, buy or rent infrastructure? Should I re-write apps, modify them or just go to a SaaS solution?

Next, the organization must become more agile and responsive to user's needs. There is no rolling back Once your developers are used to writing public cloud API's. They will expect the same user experience on prem.

Finally, you have to enforce security everywhere. As apps move to clouds, customer expectations of application performance are higher than ever before. Keeping users, apps, and businesses out of trouble is a must.

So, what is the "right" hybrid cloud strategy? Cisco believes in any application, any infrastructure, and one platform approach:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9u01S2ALW8

Let me share what some of  Cisco Cloud Center's powerful tools can do for you:

• Model cloud agnostic blueprint:creates a design that works in more than 20 data center and cloud environments. This includes OS, containers, and application plus PaaS services
• Use application management and orchestrationto help you rapidly redeploy applications when your code or cloud platform is encountering issues.

• Centralize governance and security, Guide users' placement, deployment, and run-time decisions from a single control panel.

These are only 3 of the many benefits of CloudCenter.

So,  what is the best way to start and developing a hybrid cloud strategy?

1. Register for a webinar on Automate Application Deployment to AWS with Cisco CloudCenter.

2. Read  IDC on Managing Applications Across Hybrid Clouds.

1.  Ask me for free demo

It's easy! And you will be off and run. Connecting your Clouds are challenging, but once you do, your business will not be stopped.