I have been thinking of a hybrid cloud for a while.

Over the past several years it was my opinion that certain technologies made sense to offer as a SaaS business model. Tried and true IT services such as data centre, processing power, storage, application hosting etc. allowed for businesses of all sizes to access infrastructure or platform technologies in a fairly vanilla format to scale their IT capabilities at the rate of business need rather than and invest and wait or wait and invest approach.

Now it occurs to me that many mid and large organizations are better off utilizing a ‘hybrid cloud’ architecture to meet the needs of their employees, business processes and the extended business. This hybrid cloud focuses more on the client side applications and business processes. Yet this model is far from simple.

One article I recommend reading is by Vanessa Alvarez and is called “Management Tools will be the Cloud Glue”. In short, the article talks about new management tools that utilize web and open source tools to address the different workloads and functions that businesses need as their data, applications and business processes – that are enabled by IT travel across mainframe, client/server, and SaaS/PaaS/IaaS models – and make these visible to the IT department. Interesting companies doing this include CloudSwitch , enStratus, and Intelliden (now part of IBM).

Another by Charles Babcock is “Hybrid Clouds Floating to Enterprise Forefront” . In his InformationWeek article Babcock also talks about the challenge of adopting infrastructure and platform as a Server tools while also addressing governance and security requirements. Again the theme here is the need of more complex businesses to manage their data and ensure that custom processes are effectively implemented across the business – whether this is on-premises, hosted, or integrated with a pure cloud solution.

Both of these articles touch on the needs of more mature organizations and their challenge to combine technology that has been customized to meet existing business processes with the scale and availability of cloud services. It has been my opinion, given my experience in the ERP space as an analyst and product manager for Microsoft Dynamics, that partners and ISVs would be well positioned to offer line of business applications as a service. This would allow for organizations that had a stable core ERP (finance, operations, supply chain, etc) environment to implement and grow in a more ‘dynamic’ fashion.

Yet, as I continue to think about why this has been slow to happen it occurs to me these partners and ISVs must still struggling with multitenancy issues. In other words, the line of business processes that I assumed would naturally lend themselves to the cloud are also those that may have been most customized. Thus while they can be hosted, this is typically in isolation (single tenancy). Such a model is not (profitably) scalable the way platform as a service and even ‘office’ as a service is.

So what may be the next step?

I feel the future for many organizations will still be a hybrid cloud model. The maturing of management tools and services will help many organizations focus on managing their data and information security while optimizing its provisioning across on-premise and cloud services. In the case of business applications this may take the form of core accounting tools being brought into the cloud akin to how many HR and payroll apps already are. Through management and security tools more accounting, billing, payable information can be exposed to a greater number of planning, operations and ecosystem tools that live both locally and within the cloud.

I am still working collecting more insight on how mid and large organization can successfully adopt a hybrid solution and welcome your point of view.