What’s keeping you from hybrid cloud adoption?
As businesses look to hybrid cloud adoption solutions and migrate to hybrid environments, they want to do it quickly, but effectively. Adopting the cloud comes with benefits like cost savings and more opportunities for digital innovation, but making the change doesn’t happen at the press of a button. Even if you have the talent to manage an IT environment, it’s another thing entirely to manage hybrid cloud environments, conduct a cloud migration, and execute a cohesive hybrid cloud strategy. How can you speed up hybrid cloud adoption without running into snags?
What hinders hybrid cloud adoption?
Several factors can stand in the way of hybrid cloud adoption and that’s why having a solid cloud adoption strategy can help reduce the following obstacles including, the cost of implementation, challenges with existing architecture, security concerns, and conflicts with other business challenges and requirements.
Another way to overcome these obstacles is by using cloud services such as Managed Azure Stack. This service enables businesses to extend their Azure cloud capabilities across both public and private environments. By taking advantage of the familiar Azure ecosystem and offering a true hybrid solution, companies can ensure a smooth transition to accelerate their hybrid cloud adoption.
Costs across multiple cloud environments
There are many costs associated with the cloud, especially when you have multiple cloud platforms within one environment. Depending on the platform, you may have the option of fixed or consumption-based pricing models. Businesses often have trouble identifying the right pricing model, but it may depend on the workload. Certain public cloud “pay as you go” pricing changes depending on time (or data), CPU, and execution usage.
Understanding these pricing models will provide better visibility for what you’re spending where. And help you see where optimizations can be made along the way.
Migration
Migrating to a cloud platform is already a complex task. Migrating to multiple cloud platforms in a hybrid environment can add even more complexity. Rushing to move your infrastructure to the cloud could mean putting things together in a less-than-ideal way – skipping key integrations, cutting corners, and creating broken pieces along the way that lead to increased costs and decreased productivity. Taking the time to do things right and create a cohesive cloud migration strategy will help circumvent any major issues.
Security & compliance
Managing security requirements across multiple cloud environments can introduce more risks. Those multiple environments also need to meet your regulatory and compliance requirements. Security teams need to account for this added complexity and supplement internal security with outside expertise when implementing best practices and frameworks.
Governance
What happens after a successful cloud migration? Many businesses fall short of having a strategy once they have deployed a hybrid cloud solution. Governing that environment requires cloud visibility and resources to maintain that environment and reduce cloud sprawl. This also means having the right staff to maintain this environment. Some organizations do not have those internal resources and look outside of their organization to fill gaps.
The secret to hybrid cloud adoption, deployment, and management
We’ll level with you. The secret to successful adoption, deployment, and cloud management is not as complicated as you think. It all comes down to bringing in the right qualified people. Most businesses can be more successful with cloud infrastructure by relying on expertise from a managed services cloud provider. The right partner can help you accomplish the following:
Identify the right roadmap
After looking at the current state of your IT environment, an experienced cloud provider can help you figure out the best pathway to success. The process would look something like this: They would start with understanding your business goals and outcomes. Then, they will survey your entire IT environment to understand your current infrastructure. What does your infrastructure look like, including storage, hardware, software, and networking? This cloud partner would examine your workload needs and identify the right cloud platforms for each one. Depending on what they find, the options can vary. A cloud provider might suggest the use of a private cloud, multitenant, on-premises infrastructure, or public cloud deployments.
Private cloud
Private cloud infrastructure can either be located on-premises or at a separate data center facility that you lease or own. When it comes to the private cloud, you own your infrastructure and resources. If you use hosted private cloud, however, a third party will manage your resources. Hosted private clouds come with additional peace of mind.
Also read: The Big Benefits of Private Cloud
Public cloud
Hyperscale, also known as public cloud, is generally a multitenant cloud model where you pay for cloud services but skip the large infrastructure expenses. The public cloud enables businesses to scale their infrastructure. All while saving money on power, space, cooling, and facilities.
A public cloud is a type of multitenant architecture, where your resources are stored in a shared environment. While the private cloud involves a dedicated environment, multi-tenancy architecture has multiple customers operating on the same servers. There are many benefits of public cloud and it can be a great, budget-friendly option for organizations, but cost control and expertise are also up for question and need to be evaluated carefully.
On-premises
Many businesses have critical legacy systems that still need to be supported. Often, they are not workloads they need to sunset or rebuild. You don’t have to remove on-premises data centers and workloads from the mix. Eventually, you’ll probably want to migrate everything to make updates and continued innovation more seamless, but in the meantime, some of your workloads could be hosted in on-premises environments.
Hybrid cloud or multicloud
And lastly, all of these efforts can be combined in different iterations to form hybrid cloud and multicloud models. A multicloud is any infrastructure that includes a combination of cloud options (e.g., one private and two public cloud environments). Hybrid cloud can include a mix of cloud and non-cloud, on-premises environments. Using either of these approaches can mean getting the best of a few worlds all rolled into one.
Understanding these options, building a roadmap and strategy, and helping you deploy can mean your business adopts the cloud at a quicker rate. Working with an expert to sift through the flavors of the cloud and picking the combination that’s just right for your organization also optimizes your cloud spend – you can rest assured that you aren’t spending money or resources on things you don’t need.
Provide expertise that would otherwise not be available
When you work with an experienced cloud partner, there’s no need to search high and low for top IT talent. Your cloud partner has hired staff with specific expertise tailored to cloud deployments. They can strategize and migrate to a hybrid cloud for your business with ease because they’ve done it before. Experts are at your fingertips through your partner relationships. They have the techniques, knowledge, and advanced tools needed to successfully lead a hybrid cloud migration.
Spearhead cloud automation projects
Are there certain tasks your team engages in repeatedly? Ones that involve pressing the same sequences of buttons over and over? Repetitive tasks that change with few variables could benefit greatly from cloud automation. Automating tasks can cut down on redundancies and improve productivity; however, creating automation takes time and expertise.
A skilled cloud partner can not only help you identify opportunities for automation, but they can also create, test, and implement automation projects. Your employees will have some time freed up for other, more strategic tasks, and you may see fewer errors on the simpler tasks that are now performed automatically.
Help companies overcome IT skill and resource gaps post-migration
As more businesses compete for the small pool of cloud experts and engineers, the global IT worker shortage continues to grow. This shortage runs in direct opposition to the digital transformation goals of most businesses, with 58% of IT leaders increasing, or hoping to increase, investments in emerging technology. For 64% of the new tech these firms would like to take on, they have found that talent shortages have been the biggest thing standing in their way.
A cloud partner can bring in outside help. Day-to-day cloud operations can be handled by an external team, and the configuration of skills you have at your disposal can change alongside the changing needs of your digital transformation projects, all without having to hire, fire, or train additional internal employees. With access to varied talent, your staff has more time for business-critical projects, such as product development.
Cloud modernization can consist of a lot of heavy lifting, but it doesn’t have to. If you’re looking to sell hybrid cloud adoption or a modernization project to leadership, and you’re looking for more resources, check out our eBook, How to Sell Cloud Modernization to Your Leadership.