As the world is moving to cloud at great pace. It has forced to rethink the traditional model of data center based information and application hosting to a new cost effective and efficient model of cloud computing. But while we are hurling ourselves to cloud the limitless computing offered by cloud is getting challenged. CTOs are on lookout for something that will increase the capacity of cloud beyond its own limits and that too seamlessly.
The solution that addresses this issue is 'intercloud' which was first proposed by Kevin Kelly in 2007. He visioned that eventually we will have the 'intercloud' i.e. the cloud of clouds. Think of how internet or roaming facility works. They use different infrastructures handled by different operators to give seamless experience to the user. On the same line, intercloud relies to broaden the scope of cloud by utilizing different cloud infrastructures offered by different providers.
The thought started from what if cloud saturates or business needs cloud where assigned provider has no presence. The cloud will use computing, storage or any other infrastructure resource of the other cloud provider through a standardized resource description and open federation. Theoretically this will provide organizations with cloud having infinite physical resources and ubiquitous geographic footprint. Today we have come a long way since intercloud concept was formed.
There are platforms and frameworks available today that help you build secured hybrid clouds to extend on-premise data center or private cloud to public cloud in real-time with consistent network along with right security policy enforcements. These platforms and frameworks offers set of cloud deployment options such as network security, quality of service (QoS), and access control policies the way you implement in local data center.
Year 2015 will see a demand for intercloud solutions to enable self-service consumption of hybrid cloud, workload provisioning, consistent policy enforcement, seamless management of virtual and physical networks and choice to select cloud providers and hypervisors. Intercloud is a great solution for the organizations that operate in different continents with various external forces having their own set of policies for data security.
