In the past few months we (at Unisys) have been rolling out a new strategic concept we call the Hybrid Enterprise. Normally I don’t use this forum to talk about Unisys but, as one of the lead authors of this strategy, in this case I’ll make an exception. The starting point for this hybrid enterprise concept is the realisation that cloud data center capabilities don’t replace traditional IT – at least not in the foreseeable future. They just add new models and resulting complexity.

We started with two primary models of infrastructure delivery – internal data centers and outsourcing/managed services. Now we add at least three more – internal private clouds, hosted private clouds and public clouds.

But it gets worse from there. There are many types of public clouds with many different operating models. If my company starts using clouds from Unisys, Amazon, Rackspace and Microsoft – they are all very different. Yet, for IT to really have a leading role in this movement, they all need to be embraced for appropriate use. And there are impacts across several areas:  security, governance, application architectures and more.

The hybrid enterprise approach reflects the reality that end-user IT organizations are facing today.  Cloud doesn’t make it easier to run IT – quite the opposite.  But it’s still worth it.