Many organizations are moving to a hybrid cloud. However, as they look for improved agility, performance, and security, challenges remain in running all the operations seamlessly. Hybrid cloud gives benefits of both public cloud and private cloud or on-premises data center. Organizations eyeing a hybrid cloud deployment must commence building a transitioning strategy, identifying applications for their cloud readiness and migration.
Gartner predicts more than 75% large and mid-sized organizations to adopt the hybrid cloud strategy by the end of 2021. Service level agreements, end-to-end visibility into multiple cloud deployments, workloads, security, and governance are key areas to consider for successful management of the hybrid cloud. Organizations must have an in-depth understanding revolving these areas, beyond technical factors influencing hybrid cloud management.
Why Do Organizations Need Hybrid Cloud Management?
Organizations must efficiently leverage their public cloud resources in web hosting or during the administration of the data center. Hybrid cloud management allows IT teams to prevent vendor lock-in and reduce costs on hardware via competitive analysis across platforms. It also facilitates the deployment of mobile and web applications at scale with the help of containers. Software-defined networking is the base for hybrid cloud management, which involves using virtual machines. This empowers organizations with data security, service continuity, and consistent uptime.
Ensuring security and compliance is the responsibility of organizations in running a private cloud. This brings the risks of internal data theft, let alone legacy applications and inefficient firewalls being compromised by hackers. The hybrid cloud solutions come with value propositions around data privacy management, security posture, and regulatory compliance. This makes it viable for businesses when it comes to mitigating challenges associated with regulations of data residency, while having a smooth control over data security, integrity, and availability.
Reliable Platforms for Hybrid Cloud Management
Software for hybrid cloud management can be bifurcated into open-source licensing and proprietary. The open-source solutions include complete data-center management tools designed for applications that support government institutions and large corporations. When it comes to proprietary tools, following are a couple of the leading solutions available in the market.
Amazon Web Services
AWS provides hybrid cloud solutions that enable consistency across on-premises and cloud environments. AWS Outposts gives organizations a true experience of hybrid cloud, including cloud, data centers, on-premises, and colocation services. With these, organizations benefit from encrypted data capabilities with support for security and compliance certifications.
Microsoft Azure
By allowing organizations to develop and deploy applications using on-premise Azure Stack and Azure Public Cloud, Microsoft provides hybrid cloud solutions for improving the development productivity. This, along with a complete overview of security, empowers organizations to modernize their applications. Microsoft Azure also provides hybrid CI/CD via consistent processes and tools across the on-premises and cloud environments.
Blazeclan is adept in delivering AWS as well as Azure hybrid cloud capabilities to organizations, being a partner of both these leading technology providers. For example, a global leading energy and solutions provider optimized its enterprise-wide access to data while bridging data gaps with Blazeclan’s MVP solution. This solution involved using a hybrid cloud environment and allowed the customer to reduce platforming efforts for new resources by 50%.
How Organizations Can Maximize Leveraging Their Hybrid Cloud
A major concern among organizations for managing their hybrid cloud is the lack of visibility and control required for service assurance. This concern extends beyond cloud environment to every stage of the hybrid environment. Incomplete datasets are one of the major aspects that lead to visibility challenges. Organizations must have complete datasets for end-to-end visibility of their hybrid cloud environment at every layer of their network. This not only helps them enhance the performance of their infrastructure but also prevents cyberattacks by identifying threats and mitigating them at an early stage.
Making the Infrastructure Future Ready
When it comes to hybrid cloud deployment and management, requirements of organizations vary significantly. However, identifying common implications and considerations helps in making strategic decisions with respect to the infrastructure’s use and purpose. The trend of cloud transformation has not barred investments in infrastructure deployed on-premises.
Organizations are leveraging the best of both worlds to keep pace with evolving market dynamics. Hybrid cloud is providing organizations with benefits of greater resiliency, productivity, and performance across mission-critical workloads. On the other hand, it is enabling them in addressing security challenges along with effective data residency solutions.