“Having a hybrid cloud delivery platform for users to consume the right mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud resources easily and efficiently helps enterprises deliver digital value faster. The platform helps reduce the complexity of provisioning resources across a wide range of touch points throughout an organization.â€
Key takeaways from this interview:
• Understand the total cost of owning a hybrid cloud
• Whether to move to the cloud or stay in-house
• How to address your hybrid cloud needs for people, processes, and tools
In this interview, Brian helps put hybrid cloud in perspective for business leaders. With his take on why businesses should consider cloud, how to measure success; deployment considerations and industry best practices; he explains that no matter what size the business, the cloud has benefits to offer. Let’s dive in!
Neha:
How have you seen the cloud deployment space evolve over the last few years?
Brian: We’re now looking at the aftermath of IT vs. those who want to innovate faster in a food fight. Cloud deployment space has essentially taken a wrecking ball to traditional IT processes. We have seen tremendous growth in hybrid cloud initiatives for our enterprise customers. Many of them still have well over 50% of their workloads running in data centers. They’re looking to strategically architect new solutions in the public cloud only when their return on investment (ROI) brings better business value while maintaining their data centers to run core workloads that run more effectively on premises. **Public cloud providers have recognized this growing need with new offerings catered specifically to hybrid cloud approaches for enterprises.** Azure Stack, Google’s GKE, and AWS Outposts target these enterprise customers.
Neha:
Why do you recommend a hybrid cloud platform for enterprises?
Brian: Having a hybrid cloud delivery platform for users to consume the right mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud resources easily and efficiently help enterprises deliver digital value faster. The platform helps reduce the complexity of provisioning resources across a wide range of touch points throughout an organization. **Modern application architectures must interconnect resources from on-premises data centers and scale to resources running in a public cloud provider environment.** Additionally, having the ability to easily shift workloads across any public cloud or private cloud offering, as well as integrating with configuration managers, IPAM, and other IT Ops tools from multiple vendors is critical.
Also read: Hybrid Cloud Solutions Can Make Your Organization GDPR CompliantOpens a new window
Neha:
What are the typical metrics/measurements in this space?
Brian: As a baseline, public cloud investments are consumption based, so that the ability to measure and report on cloud consumption costs by business objective is critical.
What’s more important—particularly for hybrid cloud initiatives—is to have a broad strategy of measurements based on:
• The total cost of ownership
• Time-to-value
• Cost of resources and,
• Less tangible benefits such as innovation, loyalty, and motivation
Neha:
How can you calculate the ROI from a hybrid cloud?
Brian: When making a hybrid cloud ROI calculation, consider the cost for the resources as well as the time to deploy them in the cloud or on premises. The goal is a quantifiable business value not necessarily direct cost savings for the deployed infrastructure. Some of the choices might take less time and cost less while not achieving the innovation that you’re really looking to achieve. Elements like the experience of the users in your environment or the future benefits from adopting a system that can cost more in the beginning but have a better long-term business value benefit.
It’s overwhelmingly apparent that today’s forward-thinking enterprise IT shop is willing to trade costs for features, performance, and security where applicable. It’s not a one size fits all Cloud world and that’s what makes where we are so exciting.
Neha:
How do you ensure hybrid cloud security?
Brian: A centrally managed platform with governed access, control for all users and restriction to intruders makes hybrid cloud very secure. The target workloads can be architected to whatever environment is most secure on-premises, in a private cloud, or in a public cloud with specific security features.
Also read: A Guide to Banking in the CloudOpens a new window
Neha:
What common cloud deployment mistakes do you see enterprises making?
Brian: Some enterprises have had to repatriate some of their cloud deployments on premises because they did not anticipate the cost or some aspect of the technology fell short. A hybrid cloud approach requires more up-front planning to mitigate overspending on runaway resources and matching the technology to the need. A centrally managed hybrid cloud platform can help provide visibility of usage as well as orchestrate the power on, off and the expiration of deployed resources in the cloud.
Neha:
What are some DevOps best practices you recommend for enterprises and SMBs alike?
Brian: DevOps practices are enhanced by automation, provisioning, and orchestration. When DevOps teams spend more time coding to deliver business value and less time manually setting up and configuring resources they provide better results for any SMB or enterprise. Hybrid cloud delivery and management platform that executes automation, provisioning, and orchestration significantly improves the chances of having a successful DevOps practice in any organization.
Also read: Microsoft Server Tempts Azure DevOps Teams to the CloudOpens a new window
Neha:
How can SMBs with limited resources leverage hybrid cloud?
Brian: There is no qualification for SMBs with limited resources to refrain from using a hybrid cloud approach. New companies might be more inclined to go “all in†public cloud because they don’t want to invest in capital expenditures for on-premises resources. One of the main factors that contribute to a hybrid cloud approach is that existing infrastructure can be running just fine on-premises or be repurposed with new technologies without additional spending.
Neha:
Would you like to tell us about some new and exciting developments at CloudBolt?
Brian: As we launch into 2019, we’re delivering on a significant expansion from our Series A funding round led by Insight Venture Partners last summer. Our focus is to deliver without compromise a world-class enterprise hybrid cloud platform to our customers. We like to ask ourselves, “Are we making it easier for customers to embrace the cloud, save money, use CloudBolt or find CloudBolt?†We know we’ll double headcount for a third consecutive year with this approach.
Neha: Thank you, Brian, for your insights on the benefits of hybrid cloud and how to best champion it for enterprises to add more value. We hope to talk to you again soon.
About Brian Kelly, CEO, CloudboltOpens a new window
Brian Kelly Opens a new window is an enterprise software industry leader who brings with him more than a decade of start-up experience. Aside from previous leadership roles at technology companies such as IronKey, Imation and Xerox, he’s passionate about team building, problem solving and the never-ending pursuit of customer satisfaction.