There was a mad rush to the cloud after tech giants, led by Amazon, talked big corporations, startups, and mom-and-pop shops into abandoning in-house data centers and servers and doing all their computing on the web.
Nowadays, cloud computing is a market valued at as much as $46 billion, with Amazon Web Services alone booking $7.7 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter, up 41% from the same period of 2018.
But now comes hybrid cloud, which analysts and tech companies expect to be an even bigger trend.
Hybrid cloud is the computing model that lets businesses store and process data and use applications on a public cloud – like those run by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google – while still keeping some percentage of that work in their own data centers.
Big cloud and corporate IT players like VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell are excited about the hybrid approach - not least because while they don't have clouds that can stand up to the market-leading Amazon Web Services, they do have a healthy presence in the existing data center.