Is your organisation ready for Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid cloud has been getting a lot of attention lately.  Hybrid cloud models are being adopted by numerous organizations looking to leverage the direct benefits of both a private and public cloud environment.

Cloud services are usually seen as binary options - either we are on the cloud or on-premise only. SMBs are often faced with the dilemma whether they should go for a hosted or an on-premise solution. The solution is a hybrid model. Going to the cloud requires companies to establish a balance between the use of their own infrastructure (a private cloud setup) and public cloud services. Public cloud can and should generally be used as a supplementary computing resource to existing internal resources.

A hybrid cloud offers the best of both worlds by allowing to maximize the benefits of both a hosted delivery model and those of the on-premise model. So, for organizations who want to keep some of their cloud environment private, but still use public cloud, moving to a hybrid cloud may be the right approach.

Establishing a successful hybrid cloud requires considerate planning across many dimensions.

For moving to a hybrid cloud eventually, you need to ensure when setting up your private cloud that you make it ready for hybrid cloud later - because sooner or later, your private cloud will fail and you will need to move to a hybrid cloud scenario.

The key considerations for a hybrid-ready private cloud

1. Figure out which services stay on your data centers and private cloud and which ones go on the public cloud

Now, as you are open to both private and public cloud environments, the focus now shifts on cloud security. You need to think judiciously on which services you can allow going public. Depending on the industry and type of information stored in a public cloud, there may not be enough privacy and security.

2. Assess the security, compatibility, management and portability issues you might run into while deploying the solutions

Check your expectations with regards to compatibility, portability and most importantly security of the system. Is your public and private cloud running the same infrastructure and software stacks? How will you confirm data privacy and security of the system? Are you capable of ensuring compatibility and security of servers that sit across multiple environments?

3. Figure out what your goals are for the hybrid cloud and plan accordingly

A hybrid cloud brings all sorts of complexity along with its tangible business benefits and needs a thoughtful consideration and ongoing effort to stand up a maintainable, functional, integrated hybrid cloud that delivers on its promised efficiency. It is absolutely necessary to stay clear about your goals for implementing Hybrid cloud and plan out the most feasible strategies to get your system up and running.

4. Hire someone who has the skillset to plan, deploy, and maintain a hybrid cloud

The most important factor is to choose the right cloud partner. Find a cloud partner who is expert and whom you can trust with your implementation. Similarly, you need to be cautious when hiring a cloud architect. Cloud architects and developers are short in supply. This doesn’t mean that one who can spell CLOUD can deploy your solution well. Make sure you have a dev ops engineer who has plenty of experience integrating with the cloud and handling issues with network reliability that can arise.

Some scenarios perfect for hybrid cloud implementation

Hybrid cloud might not always be the ideal scenario for each organization, all have different needs and business cases. Here are some scenarios perfect for a hybrid cloud implementation

1. Business continuity (Backup/Archiving/Storage )

For many organizations, traditional business continuity and backup solutions might have been sufficient in the past, but they no longer provide the assurances businesses need in today’s environment. Businesses should never neglect the risk of  losing critical business assets due to a natural disasters or technical failure.

With the availability of hybrid cloud-based services and the latest virtualization technology, companies can launch an intelligent business continuity and data backup plan that fits within the IT budget of a smaller business and takes the risks out of data protection.

2. Testing applications

The hybrid cloud proves to be an inexpensive and highly flexible testing ground. Using it as a testing and development platform eliminates a lot of workload, that means no need to set up those expensive test labs and hiring testing resources. Hybrid cloud testing simplifies and reduces the testing process. Perform load testing, workflow testing for your applications easily without affecting existing private cloud

3. Load handling

Hybrid cloud can handle spike in loads due to seasonal increase (or an overnight success!) Hybrid cloud would maintain the state handled by private cloud and the spike handled by on-demand resources from a public cloud like AWS.

Essential steps when moving to a hybrid cloud

If you have decided to move to, or are planning to test the waters for hybrid cloud, do consider these three steps:

1. Evaluation - understand what you are already doing in your private cloud infrastructure and what is your stack and existing infrastructure

2. Hire - find a partner you can trust with the implementation. This is probably the most important step. And it makes more sense to outsource this because it gives you time to focus on your core business. The right partner will tell you the best way to move ahead.

3. Test run - This is needed to ensure the systems work as expected. We offer a low-commitment trial program and give you a test drive, so you can determine whether our services can meet your organization’s needs.