Hybrid cloud means full employment for integration specialists

Integration is never an automatic process, as those companies working on bringing public cloud services together with their own internal infrastructure have learned. Now, we’re also seeing greater adoption of private clouds (or at least virtualized resources), and the challenge is going to be getting applications and processes to seamlessly move information in and out of private and public clouds — often as part of a single transaction.

Is anyone ready for all this? Or are we in for a lot of JBOCS architectures springing up all over the map? (Just a Bunch of Cloud Services)

Dave Linthicum, who almost singlehandedly defined the integration category a few years back, is warning that enterprises may find the theoretical simplicity that clouds are supposed to bring to enterprise computing are vanishing into the haze. He also picked up on recent posts by Lori MacVittie and myself about the back-end 99 percent of the work that will be necessary to make processes strung across clouds work as seamlessly as they do with on-premises applications. (Well, “seamless” may be a relative term, right?)