Companies moving to public cloud is almost a foregone conclusion. The question most companies are now contemplating, is which cloud model to adopt. While there are pros and cons deploying different cloud models, what matters is selecting the best fit model.
A model that seamlessly integrates into the company’s IT environment, business needs and company culture, while meeting their data, security and regulatory requirements.
Organisations are faced with a common dilemma between deploying either a public or private cloud. On one hand they have benefited from deploying public cloud for their agility and cost effectiveness by leveraging its self-service, on-demand and elasticity of infrastructure capacity. While on the other hand, they have benefited from the perceived higher security, reliability and controls the private cloud offers.
Forward thinking companies understand the need to adopt and deploy cloud models, the challenge has been to meet varying regulatory requirements, while safe guarding their data. The degree of regulatory requirements varies from industry to industry. For instance, the regulatory requirements for health care, banking and insurance are highly stringent when compared to other industries.
To address data sensitivities, meet regulatory requirements, leverage existing IT environments, besides other factors, companies have adopted to hybrid cloud models. It is anticipated that over 50 per cent of the large enterprises, globally, will deploy hybrid clouds by 2018.
A hybrid cloud combines both the public and private cloud with an objective to consolidate several services and data from a variety of cloud models thereby creating a comprehensive unified computing environment. Hybrid cloud allows for real time orchestration ensuring both public and private cloud work as a single system.
The hybrid cloud offers several benefits with some of the notable ones being:
• Security: Hybrid clouds not only mandates implementing security measures at the infrastructure and application levels, but also implementing security at each layer of the cloud stack. This enables only preapproved services to be deployed at short notice.
• Flexible cloud deployment options: As companies continue to rapidly innovate and implement multiple projects, they need to have a choice on their cloud deployment model.
• Centralised governance with a decentralised IT infrastructure by allowing enterprises to retain control of their IT environments while sending non-mission-critical workloads to the public cloud.
• Load balancing the right work to the right cloud environment when it is needed the most, by dynamically moving data, applications and services between them.
• Leverage existing infrastructure and resources by capitalising the existing on-premise investments to drive higher cost efficiencies.
• Rationalising TCO by virtue of being able to switch between different public cloud providers and also back to the private cloud.
• Permits cloud bursting by temporarily shifting workloads, during peak periods, from the private cloud to the public cloud.
• New functionalities can be introduced at a faster pace as they are not limited to just public cloud.
With the growing maturity of public clouds, companies have several options to choose from viz. Oracle Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Softlayer and more. Engaging with multiple public cloud providers coupled with the need to integrate and seamlessly orchestrate with private clouds, has placed the hybrid cloud model in a compelling growth trajectory.
Some key considerations while adopting a hybrid cloud model are:
• Companies must retain the freedom to choose their cloud model based on what best meets their business objectives.
• Judiciously select the technology and solutions based on its future ability to support cloud interoperability.
• Define workload strategy by assessing which applications would remain in the private cloud, relocate to the public cloud or move between the public and private clouds.
• The DevOps should be based on open platforms supporting both traditional as well as multiple next generation runtime environments (Python, Node, etc.). This would allow innovative solutions to be developed, tested, deployed and integrated into the IT environment.
• Prequalifying cloud solution providers based on their ability to understand the hybrid cloud environment and to integrate their own solutions into a diversified IT environment.
• Negotiate upfront service-level agreements, service catalogues and other datacentre requirements to ensure uninterrupted business functioning.
• Demand full visibility and transparency into the infrastructure allocated along with its past-present usage. Based on the results, optimise the processing power and workloads, using API management, between environments.
• Exit Path: Prior to engaging with a cloud solution provider, companies should clearly understand the condition, criteria and limitations to contractually exit and transfer to another public cloud provider or back to the private cloud.
The writer is an executive vice-president for a Dubai-based IT consultancy and services company. He can be contacted via Twitter @Stephen_Fdes
