Cloud computing offers many advantages to enterprises, but they aren’t going to give up their investment in hardware and software easily — particularly those that house sensitive personal data and intellectual property. So to cover their bets a number of vendors are offering hybrid cloud solutions to customers.
The latest is EMC Corp., which on Tuesday announced its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution. It integrates hardware, software and services from EMC and VMware to help enterprises leverage private and public clouds.
The package enables CIOs to offer IT-as-a-service in as few as 28 days with the help of EMC consultants, the company says . “Organizations no longer will have to make tradeoffs between the speed and agility of public cloud services and the control and security of private cloud infrastructure,” it said in a release.
Initially, the capability comes in a package called  Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition with VMware. Versions for Microsoft’s Cloud Platform and OpenStack will be available next year.  As a result EMC Hybrid Cloud will be interoperable with VMware vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other EMC-powered cloud service providers.
Separately EMCÂ said it has bought Cloudscaling, Maginatics and Spanning to accelerate hybrid clouds based on OpenStack, extend data protection to the cloud and assure availability and data protection for cloud applications.
Among the advantages of the Hybrid Cloud Solution bundles will be end-to-end testing and validation to ensure all components work together, EMC said, best practices and a reference architecture that accelerates deployment, workflows based on common customer use cases to further enable self-service delivery and consumption and templates that offer pre-determined service levels of infrastructure for different applications.
“Customers often-times sacrifice choice in order to deploy their hybrid cloud quickly,” Josh Kahn, EMC’s senior vice-president of global solutions, said in a release. “However there are a lot of strings attached to things that happen quickly and simply. We’ve spent the time to engineer the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution to deploy quickly and still give customers that choice. But IT transformation leveraging hybrid cloud is about more than just technology and that’s why EMC also offers customers proven services expertise and know-how aligned to help CIOs plan and implement the changes needed to transform IT’s approach to IT-as-a-Service.”
