The term ‘Cloud Bursting’ is inadvertently tied to ‘on demand’. It generally happens when one runs out of resources in the Private or “internal” cloud and has to transfer the excess or supplementary workload to a Public or “external” cloud.

Well, whole concept of cloud is based on that – flexibility and elasticity. But cloud bursting your server is limited to specific need and period. It is not necessarily strategic shift of your overall data center. Suppose your marketing department is planning a web-cast or seasonal campaign. Or you need to run complicated analytics of your transaction for end-of-quarter. In a nutshell you have specific need to ramp up your server usage for a specific period. But you don’t necessarily like to keep paying for those servers when there is no need. What you need is Cloud bursting.

It means extending your virtual platform or cloud based data center through a hybrid cloud solution. A hybrid cloud is a combination of the Private and Public cloud space with the ability to extend/burst your network from internal to external clouds. Please be ware that, those who are using these servers may be your marketing or accounting staff, not necessarily IT savvy people. You need to consider the ease of use. You can’t expect to have specially trained skilled resources to meet this seasonal need.

The ‘Cloud bursting’ solution offering should take care of this. For example, your additional servers are running in a public cloud. Obviously your real value proposition will be to avoid rebuilding the servers into new a cloud environment. But for end users, best value proposition is to be agnostic of whole hybrid cloud scenario. It should be seamless experience even for the limited period when they are using those additional servers in the cloud. An approximate example is Verizon’s ‘Cloudswitch’. Cloudswitch offers a shim layer on virtual machines and inject layer 2 packets for VPN’s so that end users don’t see any IP address change of the servers although they may reside into completely different cloud. For drawbacks though -it may compromise host server CPU efficiency or may not work for large servers or three tier applications. But it still is pretty good solution for cloud bursting your need for marketing campaigns or payroll.

Cloud Migration is overall strategic shift for enterprises. It encompasses virtualization, scalability, and flexibility for managed on-premise or off-premise services. CIOs are at a cross-road, trying to decide the right strategy for their overall datacenter migrations –public, private or hybrid clouds. This involves conceiving and deploying ways to facilitate such migrations in a frictionless but cost efficient manner. That is the big challenge for now.