Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

How SaaS Fits into the Hybrid Cloud World

SaaS applications rarely sit alone. The reality is companies have an IT landscape that might look something like this: SaaS for CRM, a second SaaS for human resources, in-house analytics hardware behind a firewall, and IA as for testing. Much of this information is fed into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that might be housed on their data center. It’s critical that processes are enabled that allow information to securely flow among these systems. This hybrid SaaS environment is illustrated in Figure 6-1.

The environment described here truly is a hybrid cloud. Why? Because multiple resources use various delivery options that touch each other and aren’t all controlled by the enterprise. These applications somehow ultimately need to work together to provide business value. Of course, a hybrid environment can be simpler or more complex than the one illustrated in Figure 6-1.

What’s behind your SaaS application? A vendor might run its software from data centers it operates. Salesforce.com did this out of necessity, because it was an early innovator without other options. Other vendors — for example, SugarCRM — run its offerings on public clouds, such as Amazon EC2. A SaaS running in a vendor’s data center isn’t necessarily more stable, but great software on an unreliable third party is useless. So, it’s important to understand service level agreements (SLAs) (for more on SLAs see Chapter 17).

If you think about the SaaS environment, ...