Architectural Requirements of the Hybrid Cloud

by Brian J. Dooley

Cloud computing continues to gain momentum as a description of service offerings based on a virtualized data center infrastructure and provided over the Internet on an as-needed basis. Public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, first brought attention to this model, followed by private clouds built within an organization, as exemplified by IBM's Blue Cloud initiative. Both public and private clouds have been found to have advantages for the enterprise, but most analysts now agree that the real power of the cloud concept lies in a marriage between the two -- the hybrid cloud.