Hybrid cloud strategies

To benefit from a hybrid cloud, it’s important to have consistency and standardization while using distinct combinations. This can be achieved through the following:

• Abstraction: Different clouds become hybrid when your applications are abstracted from underlying infrastructure and connectivity is seamless to a great degree.
• Portability: A hybrid cloud should offer portability across environments.
• Unified management: Enforcing policies at scale across different clouds and environments is important to ensure standardization and compliance. A hybrid cloud needs unified management, orchestration, and security.

Your applications can reap significant benefits from such a setup where UI/UX runs on a public cloud and applications and databases run on a private cloud to comply with security and compliance needs or to manage costs.

When setting up the strategy for a hybrid cloud, key things to consider include the following:

• Operating system: A consistent operating system across clouds acts as a foundation. It provides the ability to host, manage, and monitor applications anywhere using a single set of tools.
• Application categorization and rationalization: Build an inventory of applications and categorize them according to the functionality they serve. Determine what to do with these applications. In the upcoming sections, we will explore the R framework to categorize applications.
• Automation: An assembly line that functions without much intervention is a must to take full advantage of the cloud. The automated creation of test environments, continuous integration, and continuous delivery is a must to increase operational efficiency.
• Data-driven approach: Data has traditionally lived in data centers. In the digital era, your customers demand insights and experiences in real time, and thus computing needs to be where your data is. It’s the next stage of digital transformation, which takes data closer to the users who consume and create it. Determine where you need a computing pool and design your hybrid cloud around your data needs.
• Management: To enforce policies and reduce operational overhead, unified management is strategic for a hybrid cloud.
• Technology partner: A skills gap is the biggest hurdle, and it is very hard to attract talent and fill the skills gap. By partnering with experienced software vendors, organizations can benefit from their best practices and deliver hybrid clouds.

We discussed setting up the strategy for a hybrid cloud so that organizations can get the best of both public and private clouds. Organizations choose a hybrid cloud to deliver agility and meet business demands. However, for some industries, compliance and regulations are the primary reasons for a hybrid cloud instead of a unique cloud provider. Let’s also look at some of the compliance requirements in our next section.