It’s been well over a year that Forrester’s James Staten (@staten7) has been gently orating from the rooftops that “you are already hybrid.” 

In his foresight, he was referring to the broad existence of so-called shadow-IT, the tendency of competent non-IT folk to pull out their credit cards and purchase public cloud services and SaaS services, thereby solving their own problems.

This week, a spate of articles from Forbes, WSJ (requires login) and elsewhere are telling the tale of a far more intentional approach to hybrid cloud.

This acceptance that certain workloads, for logistical, financial, or pragmatic reasons, are best housed locally – and that others, due to spikiness (technical term) or proximity to endpoint or resource profile, are best deployed to a service provider.

Infact, the Forbes article cites different tiers of an application potentially residing at different places.

There are a few implications of this current discussion …