With hybrid cloud providing an opportunity for companies with on-premises infrastructure to streamline their operations, one of the primary benefits remains that businesses may leverage the cloud’s speed and flexibility without having to replace old technology or invest in new equipment. Let’s look at five major strategies that can help organizations transit to a hybrid cloud model seamlessly.
The need to attain digital transformation has necessitated the adoption of new technologies for organizations to remain competitive. Changing market conditions, spurred in particular by the Covid-19 outbreak, and rising customer expectations have accelerated the need for enterprises to digitize at a quick pace. An IDC reportOpens a new window says that 46% of business goods and services will indeed be supplied online by 2022. To meet these goals, organizations are adopting innovative methods to accelerate digitalization. Among these methods is a wholesale shift to the cloud which lays the groundwork for future innovations.
Most organizations planning to move critical workloads and applications to the cloud tout hybrid cloud as the path to attain cost efficiencies and effective use of resources. But cloud pros lack a bridge that can help them connect their on-premises environment to the public cloud to port apps and workloads. Data from ParkMyCloudOpens a new window highlights the extent of cloud overspending, with organizations wasting $17.6 billion on idle resources and overprovisioned infrastructure in 2020. Virtualization, the first big innovation to address the issue of over-provisioning, was done at the compute and storage levels. But it can only do so much. The reason? IT had to budget for the peak workload, which occurred less than 20% of the time. So, 80% of the time, the infrastructure was idle.
According to Subbiah SundaramOpens a new window , VP Products, HYCU, the $17.6 billion wastage on idle resources and over-provisioning is mainly due to the following factors:
- Customers doing lift and shift of their current workloads en masse onto the cloud without right-sizing the infrastructure. Cloud provides the dynamic ability to size up their infrastructure, but customers took their on-premises over-provisioned workloads and migrated it to the cloud. i.e., negating the power of the cloud. Lack of public cloud-trained staff. i.e., lack of the entire Day 0, Day 1 and Day 2 staff trained on public clouds.
- Most customers have compliance needs, and thus they need to have backups and archives for 90 days to 40 years. Even though archive stores are rarely used, customers still think they have to maintain this data on-prem in their traditional infrastructure, which is over-provisioned. Backups and archives make up over 70% of the data in the data center.
- Customers have tried to leverage the wrong data migration tools to get the data into a public cloud. In many cases, they have taken on-prem replication software and tried to use it for public clouds. This is like using a jackhammer to hang fine art.
- When running business-critical workloads, customers need to make sure they have a solid disaster recovery solution. Today, the traditional approach is to replicate the infrastructure and have it ready when a disaster occurs. While this was a great approach when infrastructure was unstable, there are better ways in the world, but customers tend to use the same old on-prem techniques, which wastes a tremendous amount of computing and memory.Â
- Traditional Applications built with data center constraints in mind – i.e. things like limited bandwidth, assumption that data has always to be local, number of cores will be limited.
Is Hybrid Cloud the Right Solution?
Businesses can make the most of the hybrid cloud model that is safe, compatible, accessible, and independent of vendor lock-in. Presently, enterprises are either transitioning to cloud computing or have already transformed their business model to a hybrid, multi-cloud platform. In one of its reports, Gartner shared that many mainstream and medium-sized organizations have embraced a mix of multi-cloud strategies to amalgamate on-premise and public cloud infrastructure.See More: Hybrid Cloud: First Step Towards System Integration
Making the transition to hybrid cloud seamless
IT teams have a challenging task at hand. While they are supposed to scale up and down as the business grows, they are also asked to keep the costs low and reduce the budget on a constant basis. “Traditionally IT has always wanted to make sure they are not the bottleneck for business and to be safe, they always over-provisioned the infrastructure. This was not always the best for business from an expense perspective, but better from an overall business perspective,†Sundaram added. How can IT teams manage this over-provisioning?Â
1. Choose the right strategy and cloud provider
There are many hybrid cloud providers in the market. This makes choosing the right one to deliver a proper mix of features to fulfill the demands of each company a challenging proposition. Hybrid cloud is an appealing alternative that combines the benefits of both public and private clouds and enables businesses to function using scalable and adaptable technology efficiently.
Tips to remember before transitioning to the hybrid cloud:
- Recognize the responsibilities and seek out suppliers who can cater to the services you will require once the cloud environment of your business grows. When assigning hybrid cloud agreements in a multi-cloud environment, look for options that interface with other platforms.
- Evaluate performance: You must ensure the service provider will collaborate with your business to learn and discover the kinds of workloads that your company runs. Consider probable latency concerns and their consequences, and devise the optimal delay-reduction techniques.
- Hybrid cloud solution providers must accommodate the technological alternatives presently utilized within on-premise systems. It will be simpler to move workloads across the two environments if both technologies are in sync.
2. Prioritizing data management
Hybrid cloud can help save costs and get the best of both the public cloud and on-prem worlds. But to succeed, data management should be a top priority. Data is hard to move, so you need to think ahead. “Cloud egress fees, for example, are designed to lock your data into the cloud! Also, data migration between cloud and on-prem locations can be time-consuming and costly. Finally, not all on-prem storage is cloud-compatible and may require complex gateways or connectors,†said Jon ToorOpens a new window , CMO of Cloudian.Â
“Begin with a project that can show quick results. A good hybrid cloud starting point is data protection: employ the cloud as an offsite data archive while the primary backup copy is kept on-prem for quick restoration. This is very cost-effective. You can use infrequent-access cloud storage and only pay access and egress fees in the event of a serious issue,†he suggested.
To implement this, use S3-compatible, cloud-native storage as the on-prem backup target, he said. This will provide scalable, easy-to-manage storage and will also manage data replication from on-prem to the cloud. There is no additional software needed and no added workload. As a further bonus, it can be made immutable to protect your data from ransomware.
Because this on-prem storage employs the same S3 API as cloud storage, it lays the foundation for a longer-term goal of running workloads interchangeably in the cloud and on-prem. For this, Toor concluded that the two infrastructures will ideally be as similar as possible, making a cloud-native storage technology a natural fit.
3. Adopting HCI solutions
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions and next-generation solutions that complement and are built specifically for hybrid and public clouds address at least four of the five challenges. Sundaram described the challenges and how HCI helps in overcoming these issues:Â
- Modern HCI solutions, like Nutanix or VMC, are built to make the cloud transparent to workloads. This addresses the following for customers: a. Allows customers to leverage the IT staff they have built to be able to be cloud-agnostic. b. Provide the compute and storage level optimization to get the most of the on-prem infrastructure c. Allows customers to move workloads from on-prem to the public cloud seamlessly.
- Modern data protection solutions built for these HCI and public cloud environments can make sure that just enough backup data is kept locally near the production for rapid recovery and everything else is stored in the public cloud in an optimized fashion without having to over-provision or without having to run compute on the cloud.
- While all of us would like 100% availability, only less than 10% of enterprise apps require near-zero downtime. For that 10% of the workloads, customers should run synchronous replication built right into the HCI environment itself and that is worth the cost. For the rest of the 90%, customers can multi-purpose data and eliminate unnecessary cloud computing. There are solutions available that can leverage the copies of data on the public cloud for backup and DR as and when required. This reduces over-provisioning of both storage and computing.
- Customers can leverage the same dual-purposed backup/DR copy for migration too. The migration doesn’t have to be one time, it can also be used for test, dev and reporting.
- Last but not least is management infrastructure. Leveraging the HCI infrastructure makes clouds transparent for operational management. Still, if customers want to leverage cloud-native services, they need to use solutions that make data management transparent and baked into what the cloud vendors do. Without this, the data management software will break the benefits and will slow down the cost reduction.
One thing that HCI and competing technologies can’t do for customers is re-architect on-prem applications. That problem is left to application architects and there is a tremendous amount of work going on in that area.
See More: Multi-Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud: 10 Key Comparisons
4. Strong security
Raj SamaniOpens a new window , the chief scientist & fellow of McAfee Enterprise business opined, “Migration to off premise computing is dependent on a strong understanding of the processes within an organization. If we anticipate the migration to off-premise, we will witness more cloud adoption, and this will likely include more sensitive workloads. However strong governance and security controls will move to control the flow of data to within the oversight of the end organization thus removing the dependency on the CSP.â€
5. Training & education
A huge lack of qualified hybrid cloud expertise exists alongside fast-rising demand, restricting the inventive skills needed to execute digital transformation efforts. About 94% of IT stakeholders encounter difficulties in cloud operations, Wakefield Research revealed. The research reported that most people identify scarcity of skills as a key problem. As a result, most businesses regularly fall short of their cloud adoption targets.
Businesses need to take the initiative to offer the required training, advice, and necessary resources to their employees so that they can function effectively in a hybrid cloud environment. Aside from the technical components, IT workers will need to be trained on the softer interpersonal skills to be able to interact with multiple vendors and logistics providers.
Conclusion
When cloud technologies started becoming a reality, there was the classic overselling and asking folks to migrate 100% to the cloud. While that would be great from a business agility perspective, current cloud pricing models don’t always make financial sense for all workloads. In such a scenario, hybrid cloud looks like a practical platform for the modern digital infrastructure. It streamlines application deployments across locations, ensuring the highest level of flexibility in responding to changing business needs. The on-premises side of hybrid cloud is best implemented using hyper-converged infrastructure, or HCI, which allows upgrading and makes a move easier by combining old and new technologies.Â
Do you think hybrid cloud is becoming the environment of choice for enterprises that rely on both cloud and on-prem infrastructure? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!