The previous three posts in this series covered Is this the Start of a Hybrid Cloud Revolution?, How to Build a Hybrid Cloud, and What Does a Hybrid Cloud Look Like?.
Even if you have been reading the series from the start, you may still be skeptical of hybrid cloud because it appears ‘bleeding edge’ and has not yet achieved widespread adoption. But many companies are using hybrid cloud today with tremendous success and for a variety of applications.
In this article, I’ll give examples of seven different industries and companies from around the world that are successfully using hybrid cloud in production today.
Higher Education: Database as a Service (DBaaS) for Project Tracking
The oldest university in the English-speaking world, Oxford, uses hybrid cloud to provide database as a service, or DBaaS. They offered this database as a service to faculty and researchers to track their project results. Offered in a self-service interface, researchers can easily use DBaaS inside their own virtual machine that runs in a public cloud, connected back to the private network via a hybrid cloud connection. [1]
Gaming: Development and Testing
One of the leading video game manufacturers in the world, SEGA, is using hybrid cloud to provide scalable and agile development and test environments for developers that they employ around the world. In doing so, they reached new levels of development performance. [2]
Network Security: Virtual Training Labs
A leader in network security monitoring, Tenable Network Security, provides virtual lab environments for its popular instructor-led courses and self-service training courses using hybrid cloud. Their on-demand, self-paced virtual training classes are fully automated for the end user from purchase and realization to enrollment and completion. The student watches a series of videos, takes online quizzes, and then pushes a button to launch a fully automated virtual lab environment. With their instructor-led training programs, students are assigned exercises and the instructor has full access to student environments, including an over-the shoulder view for hands-on interaction. [3]
Banking and Finance: Reducing Costs by Moving Datacenter
After closely analyzing their datacenter energy use and costs, ING Financial found that they could significantly reduce overall costs by moving their datacenter to a public cloud and then connecting it back to their corporate offices. With this hybrid cloud model, not only did ING reduce costs but they also reduced energy consumption overall. [4]
Real Estate Services: Development and Testing
The world’s largest privately held real estate service, Cushman & Wakefield, is using hybrid cloud to make provisioning of development environments more efficient than the days or weeks that it required in the past. With their hybrid cloud, they are able to reduce provisioning time, improve productivity for development and test team members, double the number of projects supported, improve collaboration, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). [5]
Philanthropy: Hosting and Provisioning of Virtual Resources
The National Democratic Institute—a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization—needs to deliver applications to users who lack the infrastructure and resources to host them; it must also drive efficiency in its application delivery processes so that it can focus resources on core activities. It has streamlined and automated the provisioning of virtual resources on behalf of its user communities by using a hybrid cloud solution. [6]
Enterprise Content Management: Sale Enablement and Proof of Concept (PoC)
OpenText, a provider of Enterprise Content Management software for the world’s largest companies, government agencies and professional service firms, is using hybrid cloud to deliver complex software demos and show proof of concepts for customers. Since implementation, the hybrid cloud solution has made salespeople more productive, customer presentations more impactful, and has led to increased company revenue. [7]
My Take
In summary, I believe the hybrid cloud revolution is here, and that building a hybrid cloud can be easy. Real companies are using hybrid cloud every day to deliver training, streamline development and testing, and increase sales through demo/PoC. Hybrid cloud has become reliable, easy to use, and a smart financial play for companies of all sizes. The proof is out there.
Have you seen hybrid cloud used successfully for other purposes and in other industries? Feel free to share your insights here.
1 Oxford University: http://www.vmware.com/a/customers/solution/10?sort=a&next=21
2 SEGA: http://www.vmware.com/a/customers/solution/10?sort=a&next=41
3 Tenable Network Security: https://skytap1.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/skytap_casestudy_tenable_v14.pdf
4 ING Financial: http://www.information-management.com/news/pnc-ing-wells-fargo-deutsche-data-center-effeciency-green-10022800-1.html
5 Cushman & Wakefield: https://skytap1.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/skytap_casestudy_cushman_wakefield_v14.pdf
6 National Democratic Institute: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/customers/VMware-NDI-11Q2-EN-Case-Study.pdf?src=WWW_customers_VMware-NDI-11Q2-EN-Case-Study.pdf
7 OpenText: https://www.skytap.com/customers/open-text-shortens-sales-cycle-skytap-cloud/
