The future of IT is in the cloud, yet some companies are still wary of making the leap. Their existing systems and processes are working for them, so why take the perceived risk and expense of migrating them to a new model? But it’s a mistake to think of cloud adoption as an all-or-nothing proposition.

In fact, many companies today are recognizing value in the cloud even though they have no plans to mothball their own data centers. To them, the cloud represents both an extension of their on-premises infrastructures and the latest chapter in the ongoing evolution of their IT practice.

The previous chapter in this story was all about virtualization. By decoupling server workloads from physical hardware, virtual infrastructure radically transformed IT’s ability to deliver value to the business, simultaneously making it more agile and more cost effective.

We can think of this next chapter as “Virtualization 2.0,” because it builds on the gains we’ve already seen. Just as virtualization untethered workloads from servers, the next stage is to untether those same workloads from the data center itself, pushing their agility and scalability to new heights.

Data center, meet cloud

This evolutionary step starts with the hybrid cloud model. By augmenting their existing infrastructures with additional resources in the cloud, organizations can make the most of their existing investments while adding capacity organically when needed.

There are many reasons why companies choose the hybrid cloud approach. Often it simply makes the most sense to transfer certain workloads into the cloud, while still retaining local control of others. Or perhaps certain applications could benefit from a hardware refresh, but the business no longer wants to expend capital on assets with relatively short lifecycles, like servers.

Expanding into new geographic regions is an increasingly popular hybrid cloud use case. It would be a mistake to route global network traffic through one or two US-based data centers, but it also makes little economic sense to build your own data center in every region where you have a presence.

Development and testing is another popular use case. In this scenario, companies will often build and test new applications on cloud infrastructure and then move them back behind the firewall when it’s time to go into production. There’s no need to purchase and provision a parallel set of hardware just for development.

But the hybrid model reaches its full potential when IT can dynamically scale on-premises workloads into the cloud as needed. For example, if an application’s performance becomes constrained by resource contention on-premises, moving that application to the cloud allows you to keep the application online while you resolve the contention and then bring it back just as swiftly when you’re ready.

While hybrid cloud vendors have been touting application portability as a feature for several years, the reality for most customers has fallen far short of the promise. Shifting on-premises workloads into the cloud is seldom a pushbutton affair. Typically, portions of the application must be taken offline before they can be moved, and then they must be reconfigured to work in the cloud provider’s networking environment. More often, those applications will simply be taken offline while the issue is resolved.

Tomorrow’s IT, today

Yet this situation is changing as the hybrid cloud model continues to evolve. The advent of network virtualization means not just servers, but the entire network can be untethered from the underlying, on-premises hardware. By encapsulating the network in a software container, network virtualization allows application components to be moved into the cloud complete with all of the logical networking components they require. There they can keep running as usual, unaware that they’re no longer housed in their original data center home.

Network virtualization is still maturing, but it’s not a fantasy. Low-downtime migrations from the data center to the cloud are already possible today, and zero-downtime migrations are on the horizon. That’s when we’ll truly reach Virtualization 2.0 – when apps can freely move between clouds the way they can move between servers today.

The hybrid cloud model today is far more powerful and less risky than many IT admins realize. Tearing down an existing data center and moving everything wholesale into the cloud may be a non-starter. But virtually any organization can benefit from a scalable, agile infrastructure that can seamlessly blend workloads in the data center and in the cloud – and as the technology continues to advance, the best is yet to come.

About the author

David Hill (@DaveHill99) is a senior technical marketing architect for VMware’s vCloud Air. He is an experienced entrepreneur, IT consultant and architect with over 18 years of experience working on projects for large consultancies and private corporations.

Photo by Karol Franks via Flickr CC