The hybrid cloud term is supposed to be integrating public and private clouds.
Hybrid IT is what results when hybrid cloud efforts in organizations become more of advanced virtualization and automation environments with various features. And there haven’t been a lot of success stories of organizations being able to really build and maintain real hybrid clouds.
They’ve done some things with OpenStack, but, for the most part, private cloud-inspired environments powered by VMware dominate. Therefore, a substitute term — hybrid IT — actually better describes the bulk of hybrid scenarios. This does not, however, change the need for clarity in terminology.
The hybrid cloud must involve some combination of cloud styles (private, public, community), but physical location is not a definitive aspect of the style. The bottom line is that most users of the hybrid cloud term have really meant hybrid IT thus far.
