Enterprises pursuing ideal customer experiences know that they must prioritize areas like innovation, agility, and cost reduction. In order to respond quickly to changes in the market and to customer preferences, enterprises are choosing a hybrid cloud environment.
A recent IDC white paper notes that enterprises are still struggling to identify the right kind of IT environment. For some, this is due to legacy infrastructure that is complex, while others grapple with higher-than-anticipated cloud costs. In order to achieve agility while keeping costs under control, IT teams are strategically placing workloads within a hybrid cloud that includes both public cloud and dedicated systems housed both in house and off site.
Hybrid cloud allows for cost-effective, secure workload placement that allows the enterprise to compete more effectively. Within the hybrid cloud environment, enterprises can achieve a number of goals, including improving the customer experience, connecting internet of things (IoT) devices, streamlining decision-making, automating business processes, and improving communications.
A Few Challenges
There are challenges as enterprises move to a hybrid cloud solution. First, moving to a hybrid cloud strategy brings complexity because it involves applications with a cloud-native approach that run on both containers and virtual machines.
In addition, IT teams must continue to support business-critical workloads because daily operations depend on their reliable delivery. Some enterprises opt to migrate workloads to a new private, public, or even edge infrastructure that is hosted in the cloud. Others choose to modernize or refactor applications.
Many IT teams are easing the transition to hybrid cloud through as a service models in order to offer a consistent experience across the environment for both existing and new applications.
Developing a Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Enterprises must be strategic in how they determine where to place workloads across a variety of options as well as rebalance themselves as different conditions dictate. A number of factors will determine optimal workload placement, such as latency, data control, and resource availability, as well as the needs of the line of business involved and the impact on IT. It’s also important to consider the mix of workloads, maturity, customer base, and financial health when determining placement.
There are three important characteristics that enterprise IT should keep in mind when choosing a hybrid cloud platform:
1. The hybrid cloud should be built on a software-defined, composable model in which the infrastructure is able to aggregate storage, compute, and networking resources into shared pools.
2. Enterprises should seek a cloud platform that is standardized and supports container, instance, and serverless environments.
3. The delivery of the hybrid cloud must be easily consumable as well as easy to configure and deploy. It should also be low-maintenance and offer regular, easy upgrades. Any as a service option will deliver these features.
When choosing a hybrid cloud solution, you need a guide to help you leverage the best mix of technology for your enterprise. Contact us at eXemplify to get started.