Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, inter-cloud, cross-cloud. Another day, another new cloud promising to solve all your business problems. But enterprises need to understand that the cloud has not changed the rules about a solid infrastructure foundation. According to some IT professionals, if you have rinky-dink infrastructure, the fanciest cloud in the world isn’t going to run well on it.

“If your infrastructure foundation isn’t solid, if it isn’t well balanced, if it isn’t scalable, if you can’t version that over time and reliably patch and upgrade it, then you’re not going to be able to run a good cloud on top of it,” said Bob Wambach, VP of Marketing, VCE, at EMC. Wambach told John Furrier (@furrier) and Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016 that this means you’re going to need one of two things: converged or hyper-converged infrastructure.

At home everywhere

“Any customer today needs to be thinking about public cloud,” Wambach said, adding that it shouldn’t be much of a stretch because so many companies are already running something in AWS. He went on to say that a hybrid model will, realistically, be the best bet for most.

“Then you need to start thinking about things like what VMware’s talking about with cross-cloud services where I really want to pick my control point for how I’m going to move things around, and then I want to pick my various destinations for my workloads,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE