Separating Value from Hype: Real Hybrid Clouds Benefit Legacy Apps, Too

Depending on whom you're talking to and what you're reading, the term hybrid can get confusing. We see people use the term "hybrid" to cover infrastructure or application environments where pieces of a solution are available on premise or online.  Lately, I've heard someone refer to a channel partner as "hybrid" because they were implementing both online and premise based solutions. And of course, as an integration vendor, my company has hybrid integration. The term "hyper-hybrid" has sprung up around the idea of multiple connected hybrid cloud solutions. Hybrid seems to be one of those popular adjectives like "social" or "cloud" that are used pretty much everywhere and with everything.

The term hybrid seems to get a bad rap, and there's no denying the pitfalls. But if you peel away the marketing and media hype around cloud or hybrid, a hybrid application environment is necessary and a fact of life for most of us. And there are actually good things about hybrid environments - not all of us have either the budget or cast iron stomach to rip and replace all our business applications with pure cloud. Practically speaking, most of us follow an "if ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to replacing applications.

The most common cases where you see the label "hybrid" is in the case of infrastructure and applications. When we talk about hybrid infrastructure, we're talking about portions of your server, storage, and other data center components living both behind the firewall in your data center and parts in a public or private cloud. The situation is the same for applications; a business that has applications in the cloud and on premise has a hybrid business application environment. When Scribe or other integration vendors ...