How hybrid do you need to be?

Post • 3 min read
Everybody appreciates the agility and elasticity of the public cloud, however, there are also large amounts of legacy apps that simply don’t move easily to the public cloud. This means that up until now, the Hybrid Cloud choir has been singing their 'happily ever after' song. Unfortunately, this hybrid cloud choir has largely become led by the vendors who have the most to lose and use this as a way to stall things. So let’s break down what you actually need and what could be seen as a colossal waste of time and money.

The good

These activities will benefit you in the long-term
  • Common security and governance framework. Regardless of the clouds you use, you should enforce the same security and governance principles.
  • Every cloud is a silo so if you want to have an end to end understanding of your IT, you need a tool that monitors across all clouds. That also goes for all core ITBM tools.
  • A light portal will help end users by collecting the different clouds under one interface and access control. But keep it light as most cloud usage is through automated API calls, not through a manual portal.
  • Any activity that gets your apps to run on software-defined infra, including containers, network virtualization etc.

The bad

  • Any investment around workload movement between clouds (beyond virtualising and using containers) can waste you both money and time. Legacy app workload movement between clouds is not really achievable in the first place and you need to consider what is the real benefit (and your appetite to invest) of the ability to move between clouds. You’re much better off having a multi-cloud procurement approach where the threat of other clouds keeps the prices in check. You can then implement any technical cloud brokerage, workload movement solution etc.
  • Private cloud – yes it would be wonderful to have the same experience with 'on-prem' that you have in public clouds, but the cost of achieving this is just not worth it, especially considering that you have 15% less apps needing it every year. AWS and Azure implement hundreds of new services every year. How would you keep up with that in your own private cloud?
  • Inertia is probably the worst consequence of a hybrid strategy. Any investment in hybrid technologies is money off your budget which could be used to innovate, by modernising and building new apps. In short, money that is actually used to improve business. Secondly, any investment needs usage and you urgently need to prove that this is a good investment leading to suboptimal workload placement. Thirdly, you have a large, complex platform that is not keeping up with the demand for new services, needs constant upgrades and doesn’t scale when needed.

The bottom line of hybrid cloud

At the end of the day, this is all about focus. Hybrid cloud strategy means that you invest into 3 areas – implementing and improving your private cloud, your cloud brokerage platform, and increasing your usage of public clouds. How much more could you achieve with the money if you just focus on one of them? Cloud is moving forward so fast that most hybrid cloud platforms and tools will probably be outdated before you get them up and running. Choose carefully what you need as core features, and plug into the knowledge of a company like Nordcloud who can help you to choose the right tools whilst also keeping them updated.
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Ilja Summala
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Ilja’s passion and tech knowledge help customers transform how they manage infrastructure and develop apps in cloud.