Operating both on-premises and in cloud puts information technology departments in an awkward straddling position. They can try pasting on-prem and cloud technologies together and hope they stick. But solutions engineered for hybrid environments will likely give a smoother ride out of the box. These are the of-the-moment products that companies such as VMware Inc. and Pure Storage Inc. are hustling to market.

The hybrid headache peaks when moving legacy applications to cloud, according to Chadd Kenney (pictured), vice president of product and solutions at Pure Storage Inc.

“The cloud divide is real. They are very different environments,” he said. “As we talked to customers, they were very lost on how they were going to take an enterprise application and actually leverage the innovations within the cloud.”

Fully refactoring all legacy apps for cloud is impractical for a lot of companies. So they have to look for the next best thing — some route with minimal friction. “We realized that the data layer fundamentally was the area that could give them that bridge between those two environments,” Kenney said.

Pure’s just-announced Cloud Data Services for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud are made precisely for this problem.

Kenney spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. (* Disclosure below.)

It don’t mean a thing if it can’t swing to cloud and back

Pure spent a lot of time optimizing the different hardware and software components, according to Kenney. It is taking its on-prem storage technology and redesigning it for an agile hybrid cloud world. The suite of products includes Cloud Block Store for AWS, which runs natively on AWS. It is now available in beta test mode.

The second offering is CloudSnap for AWS, data protection originally built into Pure’s FlashArray. It sends snapshots to AWS S3 storage and is generally available now.

Finally, there is StorReduce on AWS for data compression. It will go into beta in the first half of 2019.

“If I look at customers’ biggest challenge out there, it’s how do I get applications portable?” Kenney said. “I think Cloud Block Store really gives you the application portability.” That portability is the true hallmark of the hybrid cloud, he concluded.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Pure Storage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pure Storage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE