Organizations are rapidly adopting cloud-computing environments to improve IT agility and increase cost efficiencies. With different sets of requirements for different types of applications, enterprises are leveraging hybrid cloud solutions. A hybrid cloud environment combines on-premises private cloud with public cloud services. The combination works seamlessly as a single platform to get maximum benefit and improved performance from each component.
The shift to a hybrid cloud can become complex. While working on the best approaches to security, compliance, governance, and management, finding a one-size-fits-all solution or tool is practically impossible. So, how should IT leaders strategize for successful hybrid cloud adoption and management?
Understanding the essentials is primary. The choice of tools that make tasks related to hybrid cloud management easier is next to set up the requirements and approach. Most IT executives make the mistake of hurrying to pick up the right tools and technology. An approach to hybrid cloud management should consider security, compliance, data, and governance.
The following are five concepts one needs to look into before comprehending a strategy for hybrid cloud adoption.
5 Essentials to Simplify Hybrid Cloud Adoption
1. Figure out what’s being managed
This is the most important thing to know about hybrid cloud management. IT managers need to understand the profiles of the workloads that will run on the public and private cloud. They also need to know the applications’ functions, including how they communicate with the end users, manage data, handle security, networking, performance, etc.
Pondering over the following questions will strengthen the understanding:– Who is the point of contact within the organization for a particular workload?
– What is the significance of the workload, and how critical is it from a business perspective? This is seen as the number of resources assigned to manage the workloads on the hybrid cloud to bring value to the business.
– What are the timings of the running workloads? Some may run continuously, while others are triggered during similar schedules of a day. The idea is to figure out how it should be managed within the hybrid cloud.
– How to decide the deployment of workloads? Which one should run on a private or public cloud or, at times, both places?
2. Know security and governance requirements
Nowadays, security and governance requirements play a significant role in strategizing hybrid cloud data management. These are driven either by the customers or the senior management. The data on storage or moving over a network needs to be secured to meet these requirements.
IAM (identity and access management) is a framework that will allow you to control user access to critical information and assign an identity to data, people, devices, and servers. It provides data governance functions with which you can ensure secure and relevant data movement.
Dealing with the following issues is the main here:
– Security and Performance: Securing data identity on storage or moving over a network reduces application performance.
– Policy management: Policies written and enforced for governance need to be understood by resources managing hybrid cloud to avoid conflicts.
3. Build a system administrator dashboard
To manage storage, networking, security, and compliance on the hybrid cloud is complex. As private and public clouds have native interfaces, dealing with them requires complete knowledge. A more innovative way could be introducing an abstract layer to manage cloud services using a single interface.
For instance, to monitor performance, various cloud services provide different approaches and interfaces, and a single pane of glass interface can deal with these differences on your behalf.
4. Know the SLAs
SLA or service level agreement is an official contract between a service provider and a client. It specifies a specific level of service from the provider for a said period, failing to which will incur penalties. The management layer needs to understand end-user performance expectations and hence define SLA aspects. When integrating with public cloud environments enforcing an SLA adds to the complexity.
An intelligent way could be to define user and business expectations, and the hybrid cloud managers use them as the guidelines.
5. Know the management tools
As discussed above, picking the right tools requires understanding your requirements. Plenty of tools are available, each managing areas such as programming interfaces, resources, performance, networking, security, etc.
Once the requirements and their patterns are defined, it matches up with the correct set of tools. Sometimes, you won’t find all the necessary tools, so you may want to consider custom tools. The choice of moving to the hybrid cloud can go on toss again if the management tools are not helping in automating the management of your workloads. In such cases, leaving a workload off a hybrid cloud is OK as it was challenging to manage and was becoming costly.
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