Decision-makers are often ingloriously remembered for being averse to change. This trend is not new—from the days of MIS, mainframes and WWW being called a fad, alacrity in IT has always had a disparaging equivalent. We saw the same in 2015, in the niche of cloud computing, and expect some industry observers to continue with their pessimism in 2016. Despite a sea change in perceptions about cloud computing, Big Data and Social Networking being beautifully weaved into the cloud fabric, some negativity persists. This is snowballing into two eventualities—a greater dependence on cloud computing consultants and an inclination towards the Hybrid Cloud.
This shift is underway and so major, that Gartner has predicted the Hybrid Cloud to dominate in bigger enterprises, up to 50% adoption by 2017
Get Your Basics Right: Why “Hybrid” and not a Blended or Mixed Cloud?
The nomenclature underlines the approach here—a Hybrid Cloud is not on-premise and public cloud mixed together. It is not a desperate attempt to blend greater authorship associated with private cloud with the costing advantages of public clouds. The Hybrid approach is essentially an orchestrated approach. It puts together the most relevant functionalities from each type of cloud ecosystem, integrating it with on-premise applications, brewed slowly but optimized to perfections. The consequential IT infrastructure is more personalized. It alleviates anxieties of business owners who have serious doubts about migrating holistically to any external entity, no matter how secure, even those enjoying global patronage. A customized networking system with a sprinkling of load balancers, selective data centers, easy to regulate firewalls, and a more adjusting SLA means enterprises are ready to start their big data journey.
From SMEs to bigger enterprises, the combination of Azure Cloud and on-premise servers proved that the Hybrid Cloud is versatile, very meaningful for contemporary businesses
Putting Hybrid Cloud Relevance Under the Introspective Lens
Hybrid hosting or cloud solutions are perhaps more relevant for enterprises that are big on legacy data, old-fashioned IT that impairs work collaboration and is short on foresight. Even smaller organizations trying to ride the current transitional digital wave can consider the Hybrid Cloud due to its dexterity and a shared control platform.
Why do you need Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions?
Think of the hybrid landscape as undefined, unrestrained and unconventional. Unlike standard IT solutions, it provides you the role of an architect. You can prioritize entities you want in your infrastructure. Whether your primary challenge is collaborating data across remote offices, data warehousing or disaster recovery, the Hybrid Cloud can be shaped according to your list of preferences. Creating a truly Hybrid Cloud requires expertise. You need IT architects who know how to navigate virtualization, operating systems, application levels, data migration, application levels, and networking to help you construct the perfectly cooked Hybrid Cloud, seasoned with just the perfect dash of security solutions and scalability capabilities.
Hybrid Cloud Parameters: What is Driving Your Cloud Adoption?
Hybrid Cloud works beautifully in connecting scattered business infrastructures, making your data more agile and collaborative
Remote locations and disparate IT systems don’t matter when you have the Hybrid Cloud as the binding medium. Think network integration and streamlining workloads with the flexibility of making changes via a unified interface. From replication, video monitoring to multimedia applications, cloud for emails, and managing employee portals, Hybrid Clouds seem to have the answer to every organizational requirement.
Hybrid Cloud Deployment: Are You Prepared for The Journey?
IDC predicts the Hybrid Cloud market to grow from its 2014 $25 billion market to $84 billion by 2019
1. Application Program Interface Challenges
APIs are at the heart of a Hybrid Cloud infrastructure when customization is key to your plans in harmony with specific needs of your business. Emphasize on APIs to extract your Hybrid Cloud investments. Create more self-service workflows in the Hybrid environment so that IT personnel have easier access to exposed APIs.
2. Monitoring Challenges
Hybrid Clouds provide the type of elasticity you need to develop and deploy new applications, even those in unexplored consumer demographics. This scalability means being future-ready, prepped for upcoming challenges in collating consumer data or using big data analysis. As apps run via the Hybrid Cloud continue to rise, a problem might surface, i.e. the inability to evaluate which application provides better ROI or which cloud functionality really benefits end users. If you don’t have in-house resources that can monitor and roadmap applications, you might want to consider a cloud solutions provider (CSP).
3. Bandwidth Challenges
Legacy data centers are not performance oriented or flexible. Industry norm suggests that with the migration to cloud, workflows, transactions and data repositories usually increase. Data is more accessible, more than likely to amplify as you dig deeper into cloud-based solutions. However, this flexibility presents a bandwidth issue—Capacity Planning. The Hybrid Cloud usually presents a heavily trafficked data environment. From Ethernet networks to software-defined networks (SDN), ensure your cloud solutions provider addresses this critical requirement.
4. Storage & Back-up Challenges
You don’t want to spend on additional drives for more storage. Most applications supported by hybrid technology need elaborate storage architecture. This includes optimized provisioning, smarter tier creation and compression. Any latency here means compromised speed and performance of applications and creates the risk of downtime.
5. TCO Challenge
The cloud might be unconventional but just like any IT investment, calculating its total costing to ensure the real ROI is vital. The Hybrid Cloud IT infrastructure presents a bigger TCO challenge because your workflows are deployed across on-premise and public clouds. This means costing separately for internal and external entities. You should also compare post cloud migration TCO as compared to the earlier, legacy infrastructure operability. Without a clear reduced expenditure advantage, you won’t be able to romance the Hybrid Cloud. To ensure ease of calculating the true cost of Hybrid Cloud ownership, use an intelligent costing model that prompts when any additional cost, in the immediate and long term, seems realistic.
6. Workload Migration Challenge
The essence of a hybrid IT setup is that you don’t want to move every byte of organizational data on to the cloud. The ideal hybrid environment needs careful planning. Analyze business-critical or the highest-on-privacy requirement data that might be better retained on-premise infrastructure. Similarly, you don’t need to shift all the workloads to the cloud. Applications containing critical consumer data too might be retained while data related to Point of Sales and Consumer Behavior statistics might be put on the more shareable, accessible cloud.
Concluding with the Spotlight on Adaptability
2015 also proved that decision-makers shared concerns about the ability of a cloud network to adapt in accordance with their changing business plans or when entering new consumer demographics. While security issues have been systematically addressed, the reputation of Hybrid Cloud Computing to progressively adapt in tune with an aggressively expanding brand—Adaptability. This is why we insist upon employing an experienced cloud service provider who is hands-on in addressing existing business requirements and perceptive about the next phase of transition. From emerging BYOD trends to social media collaboration and creating more layers of security against hacking, your Hybrid Cloud should be easy to scale, ready to adapt…