By Paul Cragg, CTO, Easynet

Golf clubs, cars and IT rarely get talked about in the same sentence outside a board meeting, but surprisingly they have one thing in common: they all come in hybrid form. All combine different features to create a single, better product with improved performance. And all are created from designs based on technology innovation.

For the sake of argument, I’m going to leave golf clubs and cars well alone so we can focus here on hybrid IT, which several surveys confirm to be ‘the new normal’. Hybrid IT, though, means different things to different organisations.

Generally it refers to IT which integrates different clouds from different providers. It could be a private/public cloud combination of a local server and a cloud service, which bring the benefits of private cloud without the prohibitive costs.  Global analysts Gartner talk about it being ‘a new mission …