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By now it should be obvious to all that the strategy that built the data centre of the past isn't going to deliver the data centre of the future. New models and approaches are being embraced by the hyperscalers based on open source software and commodity hardware. Cloud, we are told, has made IT a utility - as simple and as easy to manage as your gas bill. Yet, while we all know there are many advantages to paying by OpEx over CapEx, over time cloud can mean paying more - just in smaller instalments.

As the changes come through there is considerable risk for IT teams, who will need to be at pains to squeeze every penny from existing investment, make sound choices with new ones, and wisely navigate the gap between vendor marketing messages, analyst hype and reality.

In this foggy world, some things are crystal clear:

1. Outside of the 'hyperscalers' hardly anyone will be able to afford to own and host all their compute power on premise. In the future a proportion of your compute power is going to be in public clouds, one way or another, sooner or later.
2. Storage growth is massive, unsustainable, and you are going to need to find a better, cheaper way of doing it, and that way is going to need to work in harmony with your compute decisions.
3. Vendor lock-down is never a good idea. In a world where business models change, discovering you're locked into a cloud provider might well be one of the most unpleasant discoveries of your life.

Three things you can do about it:

1. Hybrid cloud
Analysts IDC have named hybrid cloud one of the biggest IT trends for 2015, forecasting that by the end of the year more than 65% of enterprises world-wide will commit to hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud provides a close connectivity between physical and virtual systems inside the enterprise and those provided by the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Azure. Integrating public and private clouds allows data, services and workloads to be moved at the flick of a switch, with the administrator able to monitor and manage the whole set up via a single pane of glass.

Sensitive data like corporate IP can kept inside the company firewall, and the enterprise can access additional processing power during seasonal peaks like Christmas, without the expense of massively scaling up hardware. If you're moving towards or deploying big data analytics, or your organisation experiences any kind of seasonality, you are unlikely to have the necessary power in-house in the long term, and so you're going to go hybrid.

However, whilst the concept is easy to understand, cloud computing platforms often don't interoperate well, and moving data from one proprietary cloud to another or from a private cloud to a public cloud can be a surprisingly difficult and expensive process: Amazon Glacier looks like the ultimate cold store, and the eye-catching promise of $0.01 per GB is absolutely correct, but when you factor in the bandwidth charges then should you wish to retrieve or move that data the attraction fades.

2. Investigate how OpenStack can help you avoid lock down
If you're going to avoid vendor lockdown you are going to need to be able to move data from one provider to another and seamlessly integrate public and private environments. If you are going to compare prices between different providers and work with the partner providing the best mix of service and price, then you are going to need open standards or you will be locked down without an exit plan. OpenStack meets these requirements.

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