For increasing numbers of organizations, the new reality
for development, deployment and delivery of applications
and services is hybrid cloud. Few, if any, organizations are
going to move all their strategic workloads to the cloud,
but virtually every enterprise is embracing cloud for a wide
variety of requirements.

In fact, hybrid cloud is the new normal for IT. IDC says
more than 80 percent of enterprise IT organizations will
commit to hybrid cloud by 2017,1
and 70 percent of IT
decision-makers say they will always have a mix of traditional
IT and cloud architectures.2
With important applications
and workloads deployed across both on-premises and
hybrid, public and private cloud environments, business
and IT stakeholders must be able to access data with equal
efficiency, reliability and speed—regardless of physical
location, infrastructure type or time frame.

To accelerate innovation, improve the IT delivery economic
model and reduce risk, organizations need to combine
data and experience in a cognitive model that yields
deeper and more meaningful insights for smarter decisionmaking.
Whether the user needs a data set maintained
in house for customer analytics or access to a cloud-based
data store for assessing marketing program results—or
any other business need—a high-performance, highly
available, mixed-load database platform is required.
The platform must enable fast data access in a security-rich,
highly available and scalable manner, regardless of whether
the data resides in a data center, departmental virtual server
or on any type of cloud infrastructure

This paper outlines what readers should consider when
making a strategic commitment to a database platform that
will act as a bridge from legacy environments to the cloud.