Considering Hybrid Cloud, Services are Essential
Considering Hybrid Cloud? The Right Services are Essential
Hybrid cloud is emerging as an important strategy for businesses with workloads that require a mix of on-premise for security and compliance, and cloud for agility.
The strategy was given further impetus by IBM’s announcement that it intends to be the world’s number one hybrid cloud provider in a sector it believes will become a trillion dollar market. The company backed up its ambitions with the $33 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, enabling IBM to offer what it claims is ‘the only open cloud solution that will unlock the cloud for their business.’
However, getting the hybrid strategy right is not just a matter of moving workloads between premise and cloud. It takes careful planning, workload and infrastructure assessment, migration planning and automation, and cloud engineering to optimize applications and services for the chosen environment.
Plan Carefully
Consultation with cloud experts is an important starting point. They can review the business and IT drivers that influence your cloud strategy and help you identify the use cases that will optimize ROI in different public or private cloud, or on-premise deployments. The use cases take into account service levels, access, security, and compliance requirements to identify the most suitable deployment.
Consultants can assess your existing workloads and applications, and your business, technology and operational processes to document your cloud maturity level. This can help you build a roadmap for evolving your existing environment.
Assess Workloads
Identifying and evaluating workloads for different deployments is also critical. Not all workloads are suitable for the cloud, particularly for applications that are mission-critical or subject to stringent security or regulatory requirements.
Even applications and services that seem strong candidates for cloud may not succeed in practice — a recent survey by Solar Winds found that 35 percent of respondents had moved workloads back to the on-premise data center. Careful workload assessment is essential.
By utilizing independent cloud engineering services, you can ensure that your planned cloud-based infrastructure and applications will achieve the performance, availability, security and scalability you need to maximize the benefits to your business.
Optimize Infrastructure
If you plan to retain applications and services on-premise, you need a flexible, optimized infrastructure that is reliable, scalable and responsive to your changing business and technical needs.
An independent infrastructure assessment will identify strengths and weaknesses and provide a plan for improving infrastructure performance that will enable you to reduce costs, improve availability and deliver new services faster while maintaining the essential security and compliance for your chosen workloads.
Automate Migration
Migration to the public or private cloud using internal manual resources can be a complex, time-consuming process that covers a number of stages, including discovery, assessment, planning, preparation, testing, migration, and verification.
Cloud service specialists can provide support for each of the stage. By using automation tools like VTG’s ZENfra, specialists can ensure a smooth, cost-effective transition to the cloud with minimal downtime. This approach can cut migration lead times by 30 to 40 percent and reduce costs by 25 percent compared to traditional in-house manual methods.
Find Out More
A hybrid strategy can deliver strong business, technical and financial benefits, but it needs the support of independent, professional services to succeed. If you would like to know more about our infrastructure, cloud and migration services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.