If you’ve been around the cloud industry for a few minutes, you’ve likely heard of hyperconverged storage, hyperconverged networking and many other converged hardware initiatives. These changes have undoubtedly helped advance the cloud industry and the Internet as we know it.  However, these initiatives have been primarily focused on the hardware side of the cloud computing industry.  It’s time that we focus on the next phase of the cloud movement.

The future of the cloud revolution will be to take a look at the bigger picture… and then converge it.

The Hyper-Converged Cloud™ is a cloud infrastructure which resides on both private and public datacenter resources and can be managed by one central interface.

The Problem

Own your cloud or rent one?  When setting up online technologies, cloud customers should no longer have to decide whether they are going to rent someone else’s public cloud (Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean) versus investing in a private cloud suite (OpenStack, VMware).   Currently, the complexities of cloud and infrastructure management make giving up your ownership only the viable option for most businesses.  A customer should be able to create “their cloud” and then decide whose resources they would like to consume to power their cloud.  Your Cloud is a highly valuable asset, yet most companies have given away this asset in exchange for relief from the complexities of cloud infrastructure management.

The Solution

In order for the Hyper-Converged Cloud™ to become a reality, cloud vendors need to create interoperability standards so that there are uniform ways of connecting to each cloud.

In the same way that interoperability standards allowed for rapid adoption during the PC revolution, cloud communication standards will allow for rapid adoption of cloud technologies even by the smallest of businesses.  Every business should be able to own their cloud.  Right now, only wealthy businesses can truly afford to build their own clouds.  The rest just rent someone else’s cloud.

Stay Tuned!  Over the course of the next few months, I will be having further discussions on this blog and at community events around the globe.  Check out my events sections for more info.