When dcVAST Inc. was founded in 1989, the on-premises data center was king. There was no Amazon.com Inc., no Google LLC  and a cloud was something that provided relief from the sun on a hot summer day.

Fast forward to 2017, and the company has pivoted. It now provides a wide array of managed information technology infrastructure services across multiple platforms, supporting solutions by Veritas Technologies LLC, Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc. The company has occupied a front row seat to witness the computing industry shift toward a cloud-oriented model, but many of the same architecture and security considerations that existed inside the data center apply to the cloud as well.

“A lot of people have this misperception that the cloud is kind of an easy button,” said Robert Swanson (pictured), vice president of sales at dcVAST. “Some people who underestimate that still need help from a third party like ourselves.”

Swanson paid a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu) during the Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the current preference among large companies for a hybrid solution and cloud computing’s impact on the industry. (* Disclosure below.)

A hybrid solution of on-prem with public cloud

What dcVAST and other managed information technology service providers are seeing is the preference among large enterprise firms for a hybrid solution that combines technology to run workloads internally but also interest in the public cloud as a fallback solution for other jobs.

“Ultimately there are going to be a lot of predictable, static workloads that are cheaper to run on-prem,” Swanson said.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for smaller, early-stage companies to start building data centers. Venture capitalists and other investors don’t want to see a lot of money spent on purchasing hardware. “Any startups now are all pretty much born in the cloud,” Swanson pointed out.

When Veritas announced an alliance with AWS to deliver its 360 Data Management product to enterprises in the Amazon infrastructure, the news was applauded by dcVAST executives, since the company is a channel partner with both firms. In the increasingly hybrid IT universe, covering the bases pays off.

“The public cloud has probably been the most disruptive thing in our space since the internet,” Swanson said. “It’s an exciting place to be as we see the industry shift.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Veritas Vision 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Veritas Vision 2017. Neither Veritas Technologies LLC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE