Cloud Licensing Program enables cloud providers to differentiate and accelerate advanced infrastructure service offerings while reducing operational debt for the enterprise

If you ask three different people why they are adopting cloud it’s likely you’ll get three different reasons. The rationale for adopting cloud – whether private or public – depends entirely on the strategy IT has in place to address the unique combination of operational and business requirements for their organizations.

But one thing seems clear through all these surveys: cloud is here to stay, in one form or another.

Those who are “going private” today may “go hybrid” tomorrow. Those who are “in the cloud” today may reverse direction and decide to, as Alan Leinwand puts it so well, “own the base and rent the spike” by going “hybrid.” What the future seems to hold is hybrid architectures, with use of public and private cloud mixed together to provide the best of both worlds.

This state of possibility certainly leaves both enterprise and service providers alike somewhat on edge. How can service providers entice the enterprise? How do they prove their services are above and beyond the other thousand-or-so offerings out there? How does the enterprise go about choosing an IaaS partner (and have no doubts, enterprises want partners, not providers, when it comes to managing their data and applications)? How do they ensure the operational efficiency gained through their private cloud implementation isn’t lost by disjointed processes imposed by the differences in core application delivery services in public offerings? How do organizations avoid going into operational debt from managing two environments with two different sets of management and solutions?

Architectural consistency is key to the answer, achieved through a fully cloud-enabled application delivery network.