Data center professionals are under incredible pressure to help their business move with greater speed, offer flexible solutions and win new customers.   To achieve these business outcomes, cloud has become a core component to every organization's strategic agenda.

Cloud is not like other technology trends of the past. First, it is moving at logarithmic speed, disrupting the complete solution life cycle and creating the need for new business models.  If you have been in this industry for more than one year, you already see the incredible velocity of change as well as the disruption that has moved from the data center to the solution life cycle.  An example of this disruption is the shift from private to hybrid cloud.

Forrester defines hybrid cloud as "something you manage not something that you build."   Based on what I am hearing from customers, this definition is right on target.   The business doesn't want IT to build anything.   What they want is flexibility to quickly and cost-effectively deploy the technology needed to support and enable new strategic initiatives across multiple platforms.

Hybrid cloud comes with a myriad of definitions.  At Cisco, we believe it is more about hybrid IT, which is a service delivery strategy that places the right workload into the right environment based on business need.  That need could be speed of deployment, performance, cost, or security.  The benefits of hybrid IT can be summarized in the following quote from EMC World last year:

"I want to be able to tell our business units, if you want to stand up services on the private cloud, go ahead.   We have the technologies and operating processes to do that.  And when it's time to move appropriate workloads to a public cloud, we have the technologies and operational processes to do that too."     Eric Craig, CTO, NBC Universal

The benefits of a hybrid IT strategy are numerous.  Selected IT services can be delivered through a private cloud environment that is managed by IT.  Other services make sense in public cloud sources.  Lastly, some services perform best in a non-cloud data center environment.  A hybrid approach allows IT professionals to be the broker in the middle by acting as the service consumption hub for IT and other service sources.

Last week Cisco completed its acquisition of CliQr.   Cisco CloudCenter (formerly CliQr CloudCenter) plus Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite allows your organization to achieve a hybrid IT service delivery strategy.  Cisco CloudCenter permits developers to focus on building better software without learning individual cloud APIs or the nuances of infrastructure orchestration.   Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite allows your business to create a hybrid cloud and its supporting infrastructure to support developer workload activities.

Watch the following videos for Cisco CloudCenter and Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite to learn how Cisco can help you deliver services based on performance and cost efficiency.