It’s possible you’ve come across references to the “hybrid cloud,” and are trying to better-grasp what this is or what technology it encompasses.
To begin, let’s remember that the “cloud” can be simply translated to “someone else’s IT framework.” This framework is providing your business, as the consumer, a service that you pay for monthly or annually. This service may be an application, storage, desktops, infrastructure, security services, and numerous other things. By choosing to use the cloud, you are of the belief that paying someone else to provide the application or infrastructure service is the ideal spend and direction for your organization in comparison to investing in the tools, infrastructure, and knowledge to do this within your staff.
As it relates specifically to IT infrastructures, there are two cloud approaches and it is easiest to compare the two by thinking about the differences between “renting versus owning” when it comes to choosing where to live.
You get to leverage the massive scale of data centers globally that leading cloud companies like Microsoft, AWS, and Google have developed. The beauty of this approach is the ability to start extremely small or (for some organizations) it also presents the opportunity to start fresh if previous legacy investments have become too old and difficult. Through this approach, you have a lot of options and benefits with global availability of data and massive networks built by cloud companies. Public cloud consumption can best be compared to utilities. With the power of the internet, the public cloud services are right at your fingertips to turn on and leverage, versus the longer-term option of investing in infrastructure. When you don’t need the particular IT service, you shut it off. If the IT service is running all the time in high demand, however, it can overrun your cloud expenses — kind of like a hot summer month all year round with the air conditioner on full blast.
This is a simplified infrastructure platform that you own and deploy in your data centers or at third party colocation facilities. It moves away from complex legacy IT approaches through options like HCI, and incorporates automation to drastically reduce challenges of the past in scaling and administrating. A Private Cloud is very valuable in environments that may have legacy applications, mission-critical workloads, steady and consistent performance, certain industry compliance requirements, etc. There is still some capacity planning and upfront investment in infrastructure, however technologies like Nutanix model the principles of the public cloud, providing organizations with the ability to buy only what they need with peace of mind to scale linearly in future. Private Cloud solutions bring many benefits like Public Cloud to provide simple scalability and reduce infrastructure complexity while still maintaining ownership and control of the infrastructure.
The hybrid cloud is the industry acceptance and believe that, for most organizations, there will be valid uses of public cloud(s), private cloud, and continued growth in adoption of SaaS applications together. This approach achieves the right-sized optimal strategy to meet the unique requirements of your business and applications.
The public cloud and private cloud would exist as the appropriate combination of “infrastructure targets” to support your business applications or IT services. Depending on the application, one target may be better-served than the other based on specific requirements. As a business, you want the insights and capability to have these IT services seamlessly operating from the right target for financial, performance, security, scale, and access reasons.
Adopting a hybrid cloud approach is continuously investing in software services and tools for your infrastructure that will allow you the choice and flexibility to support the multi-cloud future. The ability to view, manage, move, and secure applications and services from a single-management pane of glass is both versatile and powerful.
When you are looking into new technology tools and infrastructure services, it’s important to understand and only invest in solutions that will be portable, bringing the same value to on-prem private cloud use as well as if leveraged in a public cloud.
A business invests in applications and services because they bring a ROI and help their greatest assets — their people — be more productive and successful in servicing your business’ customers. Your workforce is most successful with a consistent and high-speed experience as they access the workspace and apps they need. Using technology approaches like digital workspaces and cloud desktops can be a great fit to provide that seamless experience in a hybrid cloud environment.
With the goal of the hybrid cloud being to adapt a right-sized approach that balances consumption-based IT services of the public cloud with capital-driven investments of private clouds, there exists the potential to create operational complexity between sites. It is valuable to adopt a technology approach in your hybrid cloud that adds a unifying layer on top of the infrastructure targets, acting as a single pane of glass for management and mobility of your applications.
With applications and IT services being provided from multiple locations in a hybrid environment, building out the proper communication networks and availability to ensure continuous connectivity is critical to success. The great news is that innovation and technology exists through technologies like SD WAN and others that make hybrid cloud solutions attainable.
As a company transitions from on-prem traditional datacenters to the hybrid cloud, the concepts used in the past for IT security to protect data and users have changes significantly. Organizations need to prepare and adapt to zero-trust security models that leverage identity-driven access and authentication as well as leverage contextual knowledge to enforce appropriate access to apps and data services.
Still confused over whether you actually save money by going to the cloud? You’re not alone. The cost-savings from cloud computing debate often gets sidetracked into how useful the technology is. To stay focused on the question at hand, it can help to use a non-tech analogy. Want to answer the cloud cost-effectiveness debate once and for all? Let’s talk pizza.
At Choice Solutions we are focused on helping our customers leverage the right hybrid cloud solutions to create a simple, secure IT environment from the datacenter or cloud service all the way to the endpoint. An approach like this enriches the technology experience of your workforce.
All our innovative and industry-leading partnerships are with companies that embrace approaches that make hybrid cloud possible by providing choice and flexibility for the future. If you are looking for someone who can listen and help share ideas on how to move in this direction we would love to discuss these options with you.
With hybrid cloud architecture from Choice Solutions, your company can look forward to decreased enterprise IT costs, additional security and compliance, and optimum flexibility and agility for your day-to-day business. Contact us today and let’s talk about hybrid cloud services.
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