Today there is a war being fought between Amazon AWS and the enterprise over the future direction of the IT industry.  Amazon promotes the public cloud as a destination, a primary and permanent facility for a company’s IT infrastructure; while enterprises today are mostly interested in cloud as a secondary facility used as needed, for everything from cloud devtest to cloud continuity and ultimately emerging “cloud on demand” operating models.

This war is completely unnecessary.  A cloud (zone) is not optimum as a fixed, permanent enterprise app and service delivery destination. The cloud is infinitely more compelling as an on demand resource for resilience, devtest and/or agility, while a traditional data center or colocation facility is optimum for predictable workloads, even with the added flexibility and efficiency of virtualization.

Agility will likely become the killer app for all enterprises, even those with the deepest pockets, as we experience accelerating rates of change in an increasingly service and software-driven world.  That is why hybrid cloud is generating disproportionate buzz (ahead of deployments) in the industry; it is the ultimate answer for enterprise IT.

It makes no business sense today to simply migrate an enterprise app from one fixed location to another fixed location, any more than it makes sense to build yet another data center (unless it is an accounting exercise).

While small and medium enterprises may embrace hybrid clouds predominantly for costs savings (inexpensive disaster recovery enabled by cloud, for example) larger enterprises will likely embrace hybrid clouds for agility.

That is also why cloud migration without integration is simply a dead end, even though it may be the pipe dream for at least one cloud provider.  In the short term public cloud means a wholesale move (cloud migration), akin to hiring a moving company, to get you settled into your new long term facility. That has to change.  Stay tuned.

• Amazon AWS and the Public Cloud Paradox