Cloud computing has completely changed the landscape of enterprise network environments. In fact, it has become a necessity for the modern-day enterprise. More and more businesses are turning to the hybrid cloud model. This is a mixture of on-premises private cloud and public cloud services. In this setup, workloads move between on-premises and public cloud deployments as computing needs and costs change. The hybrid cloud gives businesses more flexibility and more data deployment options.
Here are the top five hybrid cloud benefits.
1. Control
The hybrid cloud allows enterprises to have the privacy of the private cloud and the convenience of the public cloud. They don’t have to entrust all aspects of IT infrastructure to a third-party cloud provider. IT staff get to retain control of the critical processes and deal with the day-to-day management and maintenance of infrastructure.
2. Speed
A hybrid cloud is not necessarily faster than a purely public or private cloud. However, it allows IT to minimize latency and makes it much easier for data to get where it should be. Hybrid cloud environments can take advantage of edge computing architecture to speed up and locate critical services closer to users.
Normally, public clouds have to spread their resources to meet the needs of as many customers as possible. On the other hand, private clouds can be more purpose-built to minimize resource demands. Off-loading noncritical operations to a public cloud makes this possible. Users can, then, customize the private cloud portion of the hybrid cloud to help them get things done faster.
3. Security
Keeping data safe is usually a challenge in any networked IT setup. This is particularly true for public clouds even though providers go to great lengths to secure customer data. The problem is that public clouds are inherently more open environments than private clouds. Consequently, they’re more prone to cyberattacks and other forms of data leakage. A hybrid cloud deployment allows enterprises to leverage the security of the private cloud with the power of a public cloud. This is one of the key hybrid cloud benefits.
4. Scalability
The biggest challenge facing the private cloud is the capital investment required to set up, maintain, and expand the network. The public cloud has given enterprises the capacity to expand computing resources without investing in physical infrastructure. Previously, enterprises could only expand their operations as fast as they could afford to purchase new infrastructure. While there are advantages of having an in-house server, it limits the enterprise’s ability to take advantage of opportunities.
5. Cost
A hybrid cloud deployment can significantly lower the cost of IT. An enterprise may have to incur the cost of setting up both a private and public cloud. However, in the long run, it’s usually worthwhile. Enterprises also mitigate the potentially disastrous cost of moving assets between public cloud providers should a provider prove unreliable. In some cases, customers must fork out termination fees to move their data from one provider to another. And, even worse, providers are under no obligation to return customer data in a format that’s usable to the customer. With a hybrid cloud deployment, the private cloud stores critical data. It becomes easier to switch from one public cloud provider to another. This is one of the most important hybrid cloud benefits.
Conclusion
As the hybrid cloud becomes more widely adopted, enterprises are seeing the benefits of combining private networks with the versatility and power of the public cloud. Incorporating hybrid cloud architecture into the IT solutions of your organization is a worthwhile investment.
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Earlier this week, we explored how hybrid cloud is a game changer for IT, and debunking myths around cloud cost management.
Lastly, thank you reading our blog this year. We wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year! Weekly CloudNews will return in 2020.
With that, onto this week’s news:
The Blurring Line Between Cloud and On-Prem Storage
Brien Posey, ITProToday, Dec. 18, 2019
“The fact that organizations need to spend so much time and effort deciding when to use on-prem storage and when to use cloud storage speaks to a bigger issue: a gap between where we are and where we should be when it comes to strategic storage management.
One of the major challenges that storage admins face today is that of storage silos. In the data center, storage is divided by application, and is further subdivided into performance and capacity tiers. Never mind the fact that most organizations also have storage scattered across multiple clouds.
There are several problems with this approach to storage. For one thing, it makes application agility difficult. Suppose, for example, that you have a particular application running in your data center and want to move that application to the cloud. While there might not be anything overly difficult about moving the application itself, dependency resources can present a challenge. If the application depends on a specific backend database, for instance, the database might also need to be moved to the cloud. Otherwise, the application’s performance is likely to suffer if the application has to send all of its database queries across the WAN.”
Security teams could be slowing down DevOps, survey shows
Catherine Knowles, TechDay, Dec. 18, 2019
“Venafi has released the findings of its latest survey, revealing 75% of DevOps professionals say certificate issuance policies slow them down.
In addition, more than a third (39%) of professionals believe developers should be able to circumvent these policies to meet service level agreements, and less than half believe developers always request certificates that serve as machine identities through authorised channels.
Venafi, the inventor and provider of machine identity protection, conducted a survey on digital certificate security policies and practices in DevOps environments.
Cryptographic keys and certificates serve as machine identities and enable authentication and secure communication for applications, service containers and APIs on enterprise networks, the internet and in cloud environments. The use of weak or unauthorised keys and certificates can significantly increase security risks, particularly in cloud environments, Venafi says.”
The good, the bad and the ugly of multi-cloud
Adrian Bridgwater, TechHQ, Dec. 16, 2019
“Cloud computing is the future they told us. Leave all your IT concerns at the door and buy into an on-demand Software (and Platform, and Infrastructure) as-a-Service model that benefits from true elasticity, robust back end security provisioning and a seamless experience for all who plug into the cloud, as it is piped hot and fresh for us from the datacenter whenever we need it.
That was the public cloud dream scenario, and, in marketing terms if nothing else, it mostly still is.
Of course, it doesn’t quite work like that in the real world because public cloud comes with inefficient Reserved Instance pricing structures, the issue of multi-tenant servers which some use cases will not permit, location governance issues, and a world of other extenuating factors from latency concerns to GDPR compliance issues. This is the ugly face of cloud.”
Experience the leading hybrid cloud management and orchestration solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.
On Tuesday, December 10, we delivered two sessions of a webinar focusing on the “Top vRA8 Deployment Considerations”. Here is the recap of the webinar and all our supporting content, including the full recording of the first session. Each session ended with about 20 minutes of Q&A from the audience. Below, are all the questions and answers from both webinar sessions.
On Tuesday, December 10, we hosted 2 sessions of our webinar, “Top vRA8 Deployment Considerations”: one for those on Central European Time and the other for those who would be better served on US East Coast Time. The entire webinar recording is posted below as well as on the SovLabs YouTube Channel here. Download the slide deck from the webinar here (PDF). And we’ve also captured and published all 23 questions and answers from both sessions of the webinar.
The decision to move to the hybrid cloud is a no-brainer. The primary concern is how best to manage the complexity of it all. This is where hybrid cloud management tools come in. The role of hybrid cloud management is to streamline and unify the disjointed applications and services in a hybrid cloud. A hybrid management tool enables you to orchestrate and control all your assets from a single user interface (UI).
So, what are some of the features you should look out for in hybrid cloud management software?
1. Centralized Management and Reporting
Visibility is a huge problem with hybrid clouds. The right tools should deliver extensive management capabilities to IT admins. They should be able to perform a myriad of actions from a single interface. This includes visualizing consumption patterns, identifying underutilized resources, and other functions. The single interface should communicate with disparate technologies and provide a unified view of activities across all your hybrid environments.
2. Self Service and User Empowerment
Hybrid cloud management tools should give teams or departments the power to procure what they need from the system. They shouldn’t have to seek approval from IT. This empowers end users to access whatever they need to do their jobs without friction.
3. Manage and Control Costs
The costs of running a hybrid cloud can spiral out of control if they’re not well-managed. The right management tool should give you cost visibility across the public clouds in your hybrid deployment. Tracking cloud spend manually can be a painstaking task, and you’re likely to miss out on critical information. Some tools allow you to compare costs between private and public cloud resources so you can optimize your operations.
4. Works with Disparate Technologies
Vendor lock-in can be a problem in a hybrid setup. You want to be free to access as many vendor-specific features as you can without using multiple user interfaces. Hybrid management tools should let you interface with disparate technologies on the back end. This allows you to plug into a myriad of public cloud providers without having to retrain users.
5. Future-Proof Integration
Innovation in the public cloud is moving fast. Keeping up can be a problem, especially for organizations that are still running legacy data centers. To keep up, you need a hybrid cloud management tool that can plug into just about any system. Public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpenStack, and Rackspace, are constantly churning out new products and services. You want a tool that enables you to harness this innovation while still being able to interface with legacy technology.
6. Compliance
The hybrid cloud is a very unstructured environment. You have tons of data architectures, payment models, deployment styles, and reporting tools. IT managers normally find it hard getting a single view of compliance and performance. Hybrid cloud management tools can find, collect, standardize, aggregate, process, and analyze performance and compliance data from across the enterprise. This makes it easier to deal with audits.
Learn more about how CloudBolt can help you reach your cloud automation goals. Request a demo today!
It has now become clear that hybrid is the future of the cloud. It makes sense for most enterprises. A blend of public cloud and on-premises IT infrastructure is a match made in heaven. It provides flexibility, agility, cost savings, performance, scalability, and security. It’s perfect for organizations that want to compete.
The problem with the hybrid cloud is its complexity. Yes, you need the right tools to even have a chance at success. Enterprises often try to figure out the best approach to governance, management, and security. They always find that no single tool or approach can solve all problems. The best way to go about it is to try to understand the essentials.
Here are the five things you need to understand before choosing a hybrid cloud management system:
1. Understand What You’re Managing
Start by understanding the profiles of the workloads that will be running on your private and public clouds. You’ll also need to understand the following about your applications:
- What they do
- How they interact with users
- How they manage data
- How they handle networking
- How they perform
- How they handle security
2. Understand Security and Governance
Security and governance are not optional. You owe it to users and senior management. You have to take a proactive approach toward security if you want to make it work. Mechanisms, such as Identity and Access Management (IAM), help with the assignment of identities to devices, people, servers, and data. This helps with access control (who can access what and when he or she can access it). Finally, encryption is mandatory for all information, either in-flight or at-rest.
3. Have a “Single Pane of Glass”
Every cloud in your hybrid system comes with its own resources and native APIs. They manage networking, security, provisioning, and storage differently. You may need to learn all the native interfaces for your public and private clouds. But this is not necessary. Building a single pane of glass helps abstract the complexity of managing a disjointed system. A hybrid cloud management system can provide a single interface to translate what something means in one cloud versus another. For example, you might want to monitor performance on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. A single pane of glass will help you deal with the differences in these two platforms.
4. Understand the SLAs
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are contracts with the end-user committing to meet a certain level of service. Failure to fulfill these commitments attracts a penalty. Your public cloud service providers have their SLAs. However, you can’t shift responsibility to them if you fail to meet your SLAs with your hybrid cloud users. At a high level, the contents of your SLA should also appear in the management layer. You see, it’s not just about providing a baseline of good performance to users. It’s more about providing performance that meets predetermined expectations.
SLAs are not legally binding, but they help define business and user expectations. Use these to define service expectations for the hybrid cloud management system.
5. Understand the Tools
You might need up to a dozen tools to manage your hybrid cloud. The tools cover areas, such as resource management, API management, cloud management systems, DevOps management, and network management, among others.
To pick the right tools, you need to understand the essentials we’ve defined above as the requirements. Then, you need to figure out what the solutions are.
Learn more about how CloudBolt can help you reach your cloud automation goals. Try a free 25 VM license today.
Although you may not be ready to make the move to vRealize Automation 8 just yet, it’s time to start planning. Time to start unraveling all the customizations and integrations that make your vRealize Automation 7 environment perform it’s magic. If you’re like most vRA7 users, it is a combination of third party integrations, open source customizations, home grown customizations, and scripts joined together around your specific business process that makes the automation magic happen.
Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Earlier this week, we looked at best practices for cloud management suite implementations, and the need for several critical capabilities for cloud management software for the enterprise.
With that, onto this week’s news:
Amazon Joins Hybrid Cloud Market, Announces Outposts Rack Servers
Matt Milano, WebProNews, Dec. 3, 2019
“After years of convincing customers they should rent server space and computing power, Amazon is in the business of selling rack servers. It’s a major shift in strategy for the company, as it bows to market realities and embraces a hybrid approach.
Hybrid cloud options contain a mixture of onsite and cloud servers, giving customers options and flexibility that one alone would not provide. In an effort to stay ahead of Google and Microsoft, Amazon is embracing the idea.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced AWS Outposts at the AWS re:Invent 2019 conference.”
Pegasystems adds Kubernetes support to Cloud Choice Guarantee offering
Catherine Knowles, ITBrief, Dec. 4, 2019
“Pegasystems has expanded its Cloud Choice Guarantee with Kubernetes support. Now clients can deploy Pega with Kubernetes on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Pivotal, and Red Hat while removing technical lock-in, according to the company.
The Pega Cloud Choice Guarantee gives clients the flexibility to run their Pega applications on Pega’s fully-managed Pega Cloud Services or on their Pega-certified cloud infrastructure provider of choice. At the same time, containerisation has changed the way organisations manage their cloud applications, with Kubernetes a key player in this space due to the fact it enables scalability, flexibility, and data security, according to Pega.
With this announcement, Pega now expands its Pega Cloud Choice Guarantee by supporting the following flavors of Kubernetes offered from leading cloud providers: AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), and Red Hat OpenShift.”
Shift to the hybrid cloud drives increased reliance on MSPs
Mike Vizard, SmarterMSP, Dec. 3, 2019
“Just about everyone agrees that more application workloads will be moving into the cloud. The only real question now, is to what degree. A survey of 508 IT professionals conducted by Internap (INAP), a provider of managed services, finds that nearly 9 in 10 organizations (88 percent) who have on-premise data centers today will be moving some of their workloads to the cloud, managed hosting, or colocation environment in the next three years. Despite this, survey respondents said they only expect to see a 38 percent reduction, on average, in on-premise workloads by 2022.
This suggests that in the foreseeable future, IT environments will by definition be hybrid. The survey finds most majority of organizations (69 percent) already deploy workloads on more than one platform. Among those who host in the cloud or with managed hosting providers, only 32 percent exclusively use one type of hosted environment.”
Experience the leading hybrid cloud management and orchestration solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.
The cloud can be overwhelming for enterprises that have finally decided to make the move. There are tons of cloud providers, pricing structures, and service offerings to choose from. It’s usually not a one-size-fits-all affair.
With the ever-growing workload requirements and compliance standards, organizations are increasingly seeing the value in hybrid cloud platforms. But there’s a problem. The hybrid cloud comes with management and visibility challenges related to security, performance, compliance, and governance. The only way to manage the chaos is by using a cloud management suite. It centralizes tasks across public and private clouds.
So, what is a cloud management suite?
A cloud management suite is a set of software tools used to control and monitor hybrid cloud and multi-cloud resources. Also referred to as a cloud management platform, it helps to centralize control of various cloud-based infrastructures.
The features of a cloud management suite usually vary by vendor. There are some niche tools aimed at specific industries. You’ll also find a broader set of tools that work for just about any business.
Vendors provide these tools as an on-premise deployment or via a software-as-a-service model. Cloud management involves exercising administrative control over private, public, multi-cloud, and hybrid deployments.
Cloud Management Platform Capabilities
A typical cloud management suite should include the following capabilities:
- General Services. This includes self-service capabilities, as well as reporting and analytics.
- Service Management. This helps with workload deployment, capacity planning, and performance monitoring.
- Resource Management. This aids in the management of cloud computing resources, such as storage, networks, and virtual machines.
- Financial Management. This helps with tracking and allocating cloud computing spend.
- Governance and Security. This enables enforcement of policy-based control of cloud resources.
Cloud Management Suite Implementation Best Practices
1. Map Your Architecture According to Requirements
Make sure to map your whole network, so you know where the cloud fits in your overall strategy. This way, you will avoid having to backfill gaps in the data needs of customers and business managers. Different lines of business should ideally use the services of different cloud providers.
2. Standardized Consumption
In a multi-cloud setup, each business unit might use services from different providers. For instance, you might use Azure for analytics, AWS for storage, and IBM Cloud for AI. Business units usually have to pay for these services in different ways. For example, they may buy AWS through a web portal or Azure through a sales rep. They may issue a contract for IBM Cloud. This set of circumstances can easily get out of hand in organizations with many business units. A cloud management suite should provide a central place for IT and procurement to manage consumption in a standardized way.
3. Integration is a Necessity
Enterprises are increasingly consuming a growing list of services from multiple cloud providers. As a result, they’re running into problems, such as escalating costs, slow deployment, lack of reliability, and lack of visibility. IT needs common standards for managing and integrating the supplier ecosystem to help address these problems. The six areas of integration required in a hybrid or multi-cloud setup include business, information, governance, information, tools, and processes.
For example, the network layer is a critical component of multi-cloud deployments. It should operate in such a way that companies can run their apps in a hybrid environment. Network control, visibility, and security should extend into the multi-clouds. These environments should operate as a single network.
4. Use Containers
Containers make it possible to abstract applications from the environment in which they run. Packaging applications and all their dependencies in containers improves portability and simplifies management. This is because enterprises can now deploy deployed applications consistently and easily in any environment. This could be an on-premises data center, the public cloud, or even a personal computer.