Hybrid Cloud: Achieve Better Business Outcomes
Businesses are implementing hybrid cloud solutions to support technical and process innovation that drive better business outcomes. But without an effective plan, requirements can be missed, security can be at risk and cost can proliferate.
When you are planning your hybrid cloud strategy there are five key considerations:
- Plan for reliability, scalability, and agility
Hybrid cloud infrastructure enables adaptation, changes, agility, and scalability. From the data center to the edge to the public cloud, this integrated environment is critical to ensure data is accessible in the right location at the right time. Such an environment requires a flexible, adaptable network implementation that effectively enforces security policy expectations allowing innovations built on the cloud to reach service consumers.
- Account for ease of use and self-service
A practical hybrid cloud approach allows users anywhere to connect to and access an application or digital service instantly and easily via self-serve portals and automation, thus moving away from manually driving service desk ticketing and bureaucracy to a more consumer-like experience. Well planned and executed self-service technologies hide complexities from users, such as connections to third-party services via seamless user experience.
- Design for availability, resilience, and elasticity
The ability to scale to meet business demands is critical and drives significant business efficiencies, and automation plays a key role. You achieve availability, resiliency, and rapid scalability in the cloud by deploying resources across virtual availability zones. Such an architecture allows for implementing the traditional concepts of high availability and disaster recovery without the traditional sunk cost of additional facilities that an organization must manage.
- Make hybrid cloud security part of the design
A hybrid cloud infrastructure can create security challenges. An effective security strategy needs to meets your business and workload requirements. You must examine which cloud services work better within specific environments and how it will evolve based on cloud architecture choices. This means factoring the time and staffing to need to maintain and update your hybrid cloud strategy as business needs change – cloud service providers won’t do that for you.
- Place cost governance at the heart of hybrid cloud strategy
Hybrid cloud brings new elements to the cost conversation. To fully reap the benefits of a cloud strategy, you must think about cost control rather than cost savings. Asking, how can I deploy the most effective hybrid cloud strategy? What are its costs? How will these investments pay off in the future? A focus only on cost savings can lead to a sub-par cloud strategy that doesn’t meet organizational needs.
Implementing a hybrid cloud is a journey that requires a sold plan and governance to get the right architecture. This all starts with understanding necessary business requirements. Specifically, requirements such as flexibility, speed to market, and uptime are a good place to start. Other requirements such as RTO/RPO, cost management, and security are equally as important, and come from understanding the underlying business requirements. Once all business requirements are understood and documented, a proper hybrid cloud architecture should be developed, and may include both public cloud (AWS, Azure, etc.) and a private cloud (internal infrastructure) that can support cloud-like capabilities.
Regardless of the mixture of public and private cloud services, a hybrid cloud should be seamless to the end consumers (users, developers, etc.). What this means is that the consumers of the services shouldn’t be burdened with where the resources are coming from, they should just know that when a request is made, they get the resources required in a timely and secure manner. From the end-user perspective, the services in the hybrid cloud should be seamless and have the same look and feel regardless of where the compute physically is. By making the hybrid cloud seamless to the consumers, they are free to perform their activities to support the business.
Wherever you are in your cloud journey, Evolving Solutions has the experience and expertise to architect a seamless hybrid cloud — no matter the size or complexity of the business. Evolving Solutions will start with the business requirements, design the hybrid cloud for the business, and implement the hybrid cloud for IT departments that meets all requirements.
Learn more about our Hybrid Cloud approach here.
