As 2019 gets underway with major public cloud providers “all in” with recent hybrid cloud initiatives, consider the ingredients for success. The main driver for hybrid cloud is that enterprises now realize that they don’t need to go as fast to the public clouds as was once expected.
Most enterprises know from experience to not give up on their data centers, but rather embrace what is working well as they undergo public cloud adoption. This is the foundation for hybrid cloud strategies. As shown in the following recent IDC market forecast, traditional data center infrastructure deployments are not going away any time soon.
After talking to a lot of prospects and customers, we have identified a number of common challenges that plague enterprises that want hybrid cloud deployments to be successful.
Hybrid Cloud Challenges
Having a mix of on-premises infrastructure with private and public cloud options creates complexity. IT admins, developers, and DevOps teams must manage access to the environments and include the potential for silos of tribal knowledge for particular vendor resources. These can be from either legacy or acquired infrastructure environments, and priorities can shift based on the individuals involved in the process. The reality is that many of us play favorites, making it important to recognize that when people in key positions turnover, the focus of what is used and from where will change.
Getting resources can require a lengthy process of administrative overhead to ensure that deployed infrastructure is approved and secure. Gaining access to each environment can also require a different set of tools or expertise that can easily go on without the proper oversight. The ability to track costs and provide visibility into usage patterns becomes difficult when the information is stashed away in a specific tool or resource.
Adopting a hybrid cloud strategy requires addressing the following:
- Complexity from multiple on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud resources
- Problematic and lengthy provisioning processes to deploy resources
- Insufficient visibility, governance, and control across all resource environments
4 Ingredients for Hybrid Cloud Nirvana
As enterprises grapple with the challenges of deploying hybrid cloud resources, these four characteristics have been what many of our prospects and customers want in a hybrid cloud management platform.
Single Platform
A single platform connected to multiple cloud and on-premises resources helps to reduce the complexity and provide a consistent user experience for end-users accessing resources. The backend configuration is done ahead of time so that access to resources becomes easier and end users can start using the resources they need right away.
Secure Role-Based Access
Having secure role-based access control (RBAC) means that individuals only have access to the resources they need and other resources are protected from exposure to bad actors seeking to cause problems. RBAC for a single hybrid cloud platform based on existing enterprise user profiles is ideal so that configuration and provisioning can be leveraged using already established rules.
Safeguards for Spending
Having safeguards in place to prevent overspending on runaway IT resources ensures that end users don’t unintentionally spend on public cloud resources that are not governed by central IT. It’s easy to leave things on or overprovision resources when no one is held accountable. Having the controls in place helps everyone. It’s like having a chime in your car when you go over a certain speed to protect you from getting an unwanted speeding ticket.
Standardized Templates for Automation and Extensibility
Having standardized templates for automation of DevOps processes helps create a more efficient environment to implement continuous integration and delivery of CI/CD workflows. Being able to hook into any hybrid cloud resources and update the infrastructure with automated processes provide greater value for any DevOps team.
