The current state of on-premises, hybrid, and cloud workflows (and how they can work together to deliver for you and your business needs)
Every business has a customized set of goals to achieve, no matter the size or business strategy, and they are all vying to create their cloud transformation vision to achieve their initiatives with minimal disruption to the current business model. Building and translating the organization’s existing digital estate and goals into a cloud adoption framework takes time and must involve every aspect of the business, including processes, procedures, current management frameworks, upskilling, operational support, and most importantly – your business culture.
In the following section, we will learn about current cloud trends. We will define each of the on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-native infrastructure models, and will discuss key factors in determining an organization’s path to the cloud.
Identifying current hybrid cloud trends
In an ever-expanding digital world for businesses, cloud adoption has blossomed over the past few years and is showing no signs of slowing down; new and creative trends in utilization appear almost overnight. Businesses have hundreds or thousands of servers, applications, and digital resources and most organizations are combining their use of both private and public clouds to embrace a multi-cloud approach with this increasing cloud acceleration. Let’s define what each of the infrastructure types brings to the business, and debate whether there is a one-size-fits-all approach to cloud transformation and adoption.
Defining on-premises infrastructure
The term on-premises infrastructure refers to the use of the business’ own software, hardware, technology, and data that is traditionally set up and running within the four walls of the organization. This approach allows for complete control over the infrastructure, from setup to management, architecture, and security.
Defining hybrid infrastructure
The term hybrid infrastructure refers to the integration of a mixed computing environment, comprising an on-premises data center (or private cloud), private cloud services, and a public cloud. Arguably the most important component of this infrastructure is a resilient connection to both the hybrid cloud’s private and public cloud computing environments.
Defining cloud-native infrastructure
The term cloud-native refers to the packaging of application code and dependencies into containers, deploying these applications as microservices or APIs, and managing them by utilizing DevOps practices, processes, and tools for a reliable and secure approach at scale. This typically includes a cloud-provided Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (Saas), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Databases-as-a-Service (DbaaS), and even Container-as-a-Service (CaaS).
On-premises versus hybrid versus cloud-native – is there a one size fits all?
This cloud menu approach allows businesses to consciously harness the power and agility of each of these computing components and determine when and where it assists them in their transformation while taking advantage of investments in the existing data center architecture. For businesses to be successful, they must successfully assess their current digital estate, not only for existing workloads but for optimizing cost control and management. This must also include what’s called the 5Rs approach: rehost, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, and replace.
While this is not a new digital paradigm shift, interest continues to grow in finding advancements to provide ample operational scale, decrease deployment and management speed, and increase the overall resiliency and efficiency of any business workloads running in the cloud.
No, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for cloud services. Instituting a Crawl > Walk > Run approach that’s customized to your business needs will help to identify the right overall benefits, migration speed, priorities, and selection of services. This measurable approach will ultimately help you choose the correct approach to select services that meet you and your business where you are in your transformation efforts.