Hybrid is an overused and overhyped word, says Peter Moore of Amazon Web Services

Companies across the globe today are looking at moving their Information Technology (IT) to cloud for its benefits are clear. It is agile, easy to scale up and there is absolutely no capex cost.

However, there are certain organisations that cannot move from on-premise to cloud for several reasons. Often they need to be close to a factory or a field or there is sensitive data that has to be on-premise or some organisations prefer low latency. For such customers what helps is a hybrid infrastructure where they can connect their on-premise data centres with the cloud environment.

Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director for Amazon Web Services, Global Public Sector - APAC and Japan cautions that it is becoming a buzzword that is overused and overhyped. "It's being used as if it is better to have hybrid infrastructure versus using cloud by itself. Hybrid is a part of the journey, it is not the destination," says Moore.

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The reason for that is in most countries including in India, customers in public sector have a lot of legacy infrastructure and for a new project they still think in terms of hardware configuration and a new data centre, he adds. Cloud doesn't work like that. One pays as per use and can scale up and down as per requirement.

What is common to see is for organisations to get paralysed if they can't figure out how to move every last workload, says Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services. "Organisations can characterise all applications on the basis of easiest and hardest to move to cloud and migrate in that sequence plan." He adds, by doing that they get the benefits of the cloud for several applications much more quickly and the learning and experience from it helps to move the last application."

AWS is working with more than 5,000 government organisations, around 10,000 academic institutions, and about 28,000 nonprofits worldwide. One of their key projects has been with Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of Manipur where it has migrated 16 citizen services to cloud. It is the first state in India to move its citizen services to cloud. India's cooperative society The Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO) too is running its ecommerce portal for the farmers on AWS.

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(The writer was invited to attend AWS Public Sector Summit Washington, DC by the company)