Multiple Flavors of Cloud Computing Become IT Norm

While the majority of application workloads continue to run in some form of what might loosely be called a private cloud, there's no doubt that there's been a significant shift in terms of deploying application workloads on public cloud services. However, the use of multiple private and public clouds is becoming the new IT norm, according to the findings of a new survey conducted by RightScale, a provider of cloud management tools. The study, based on a poll of 1,060 IT professionals, shows that a small percentage of respondents are using only private clouds or only public clouds. In fact, not only will IT organizations use private and public clouds to host distinct classes of application workloads, many also expect to manage hybrid cloud computing environments. For solution providers, that means the amount of diversity in cloud models will be relatively high, which means more often than not that IT organizations will be looking for external help to manage all that complexity. One sign that the cloud is maturing is the fact that security is now considered less of a challenge compared with the past two years. Channel Insider examines key findings from the study.