Over the last few years, I've watched cloud technology evolve beyond the cloud. Today, many of the companies I work with need flexible access to IT resources and services outside their on-premises data center. With "hybrid" cloud technology, IT can extend the data center without capital investment to reach seamlessly across multiple clouds from different providers around the world.

Hybrid cloud, if done right, enables many different kinds of choice. Choice of a wide range of providers. Choice of enterprise-class performance, reliability, and security. Choice of where to place workloads. With so much choice, however, comes the challenge of finding a way to easily bring it all together in a way that meets your organization's specific needs.

To help you get the most out of cloud, we here at Cisco have created Intercloud Fabric. Intercloud Fabric simplifies your access to the hybrid cloud, providing a consistent way for you to take advantage of your growing number of choices. If you consider that the cloud is changing how we think about, deploy, and manage infrastructure and services, Intercloud Fabric changes the underlying mechanisms through which we access and consume these services.

To understand how Intercloud Fabric achieves this, consider the partnership between Sungard Availability Services and Presidio. Sungard AS is a leading provider of Cisco Powered cloud services. Presidio is one of Sungard AS' largest channel partners.

In "Driving the Hybrid IT Revolution", Max Feneck at Sungard AS, describes how Intercloud Fabric represents a tremendous opportunity for both Sungard AS and its customers. From Feneck's perspective, Intercloud Fabric enables Sungard AS to provide choice with compliance and control to its hybrid cloud customers. Choice comes in the form of seamless access to a wide range of cloud-based resources with flexible workload placement and portability between clouds. Compliance allows organizations to reach out across the world by working with local providers. And control means IT can meet the needs of users without compromising the needs of IT.

I've also seen how Intercloud Fabric provides a means for providers to work together in a whole new way with their channel partners and even other providers. In "Secure Seamless Capacity Growth and Augmentation with Hybrid Cloud", Johan Milbrink at Presidio, shares the many ways Intercloud Fabric enables Presidio to extend the value of cloud services, such as those offered by Sungard AS, to its customers.

For example, Presidio Managed Cloud gives users a single-pane interface to easily augment data center capacity through Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). When combined with Intercloud Fabric, users can enjoy effectively unlimited dev/test capacity, flexible workload placement, workload portability, one-stop cloud services, and global access. And all these benefits are easily accessible even to non-technical users.

At Cisco, we've also worked hard to ensure the value of Intercloud Fabric to your organization does not stop here. If your business is global, you understand the challenge of maintaining compliance with local regulations. By working with providers that can provide local access within the countries where you do business, you can avoid having to stand up your own data centers.

Are you ready to move beyond the cloud? With Intercloud Fabric for Business you can take full advantage of hybrid cloud technology and access a whole new world of choices.

Learn more about how hybrid cloud solutions based on Intercloud Fabric from providers like Sungard AS and Presidio can enable you to build out your cloud, your way.