At the OpenStack Enterprise forum, Wikibon founder Dave Vellante proclaimed 2014 “the year of the cloud.” Now that they hype has died down, he said, true change is beginning to occur in large-scale businesses.

Many of those businesses are still wrestling with the question of whether to adopt public clouds, private clouds or a hybrid. Private clouds are considered the safest on-ramp to cloud computing, and for companies that face strict regulations over data ownership or location, they may be the only option.

That doesn’t mean these companies need to sacrifice the flexibility, availability and efficiency of cloud computing, though. Here’s a look at how three companies – Hotlink Corp., Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard Co., are attempting to offer enterprises ways to build private clouds that function like their public counterparts.

Hotlink Hybrid IT Platforms

Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of the Hotlink, explains that Hotlink enables the enterprise to operate more like a public cloud by compromising: Hotlink offers “hybrid IT platforms that combine the best of both public and private clouds to provide the scalability, flexibility and speed users need at an economical price.”

In concert with VMware’s management infrastructure, Hotlink frees administrators from worrying about “building out costly infrastructure for various projects or creating […]redundant architecture at off-site locations for disaster recovery and business continuity[…].” Instead, enterprises can use VMware’s vCenter to “leverage the public cloud to supplement their existing on-premise data centers.” Using vCenter as “single point of administration management,” ensures that administrators have simultaneous access to their “infrastructure, tools, [and] workflows,” so that interoperation between private and public cloud services is seamless.

When asked what mid-market firms and enterprises are looking for when it comes to infrastructure, LeBlanc described a system that embraces change, one that “evolves with the growth of the company, as well as expands easily to handle the growing and varied compute demand from users.”

Microsoft Win Server

Indeed, while enterprises seek to become more like the public cloud, few want to be “locked in” to it, according to Brad Anderson, Corporate VP of Windows Server & System Center at Microsoft, “they want to be secure.” Because enterprises operate on a mass scale, their services and workloads require different levels of security to manage. Enterprises need the flexibility to move between public and private cloud without a huge hassle.

Microsoft, he says, works to ensure that its clients have all options on the table when it comes to cloud. Clients can move a workload from private to public cloud without adding even a line of code. Anderson explains: “We can promise and prove that when you develop an application to run on Win Server, you can move it across the clouds and you are not locked in any cloud.”

HP Helion Cloud Portfolio

Bill Hilf, senior VP of HP Helion products and services, is in the same camp as Brad Anderson and Lynn LeBlanc. HP Helion also emphasizes flexibility and scalability, giving enterprises the reins when it comes to the type of set up they need: “…we believe that customers will build the cloud that they need and not necessarily the cloud that the vendor is trying to describe. So against that vision, what we built is a cloud portfolio that is very composable,” he said. Based on their needs, HP Helion clients can put together an environment of, “distinct but complementary components” specifically suited to their business requirements.

Solutions from the Hotlink Corporation, Microsoft, and HP Helion allow enterprises to implement key characteristics of public cloud without requiring a total migration. The possibilities a hybrid cloud environment opens up mean enterprises need to consider the environment in which their workload should exist, but also how to move easily between both public and private cloud. Making their internal cloud more like a public one makes it easier to maneuver deftly between public and private options.

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