Many agencies' cloud strategies are still evolving, but most large agencies are using a mix of private and public commercial clouds for a variety of workloads, including email and collaboration, content management, test and development, big data analytics and even security.

The hybrid cloud can serve as a bridge between private and public commercial clouds, helping agencies to protect investments in existing technology and develop and move newer applications into public clouds. Virtualization and unified management are crucial components of that bridge.

Bonus Report: A new cloud approach

"Having a unified management plane to manage the resources on premises and within commercial cloud providers is absolutely critical. Without that you have no way to understand where data resides or how to effectively manage it," said Anil Karmel, a former deputy chief technology officer with the National Nuclear Security Administration, and now CEO of C2 Labs, a cloud security and services company.

Virtualizing the network is a critical next step toward the evolution of the hybrid cloud, said Doug Bourgeois, vice president of end-user computing with VMware U.S. Public Sector, which recently unveiled the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.

Virtualization at the network layer allows managers to disconnect the application from the physical network. Once that is done they can move the entire business application across a unified management control point. "You can actually migrate from data center to data center," said Bourgeois.

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