How to embrace hybrid cloud reality and do it right

Hybrid-cloud According to Gartner, more than 75% of medium and large organizations will have adopted a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy by 2021.

Many saw hybrid cloud as a springboard to the public cloud and have not prepared well for this new hybrid reality.

As organizations continue to manage IT resources and workloads, both on-premise and in the cloud, many are beginning to realize that hybrid IT is not an easily defined methodology or approach. The cloud may be an inevitability for organizations looking to increase their flexibility and speed of innovation in this time of uncertainty, but it is also complex.

Build your all-star team.

Having the right people and processes is essential. While it may seem like the best approach to keep up with the latest trends, it's better to have a team you trust to make smart decisions about which technologies will have the greatest long-term business impact on based on the specific needs of your organization.

To do this, it is important for your cloud strategy to balance business needs with the technological and financial realities of hybrid cloud computing. The needs of marketing and sales teams will differ from development or engineering. Cloud strategy must meet these different needs, otherwise IT teams will find it challenging to ensure consistent performance, security and governance in the hybrid cloud environment. In addition, to keep everything under control, IT teams must strive to create crash barriers, not roadblocks, so that departments are not tempted to find a solution.

Understand your ability.

The foundation for any successful hybrid cloud strategy is the visibility and tracking of all IT assets and cloud services across the organization. Without this insight, you're likely to waste money and expose your business to risk with outdated software, misconfigured resources, and failure to adhere to compliance standards.

Different functions within IT often have separate systems, each of which gives an incomplete picture of the assets of an organization. Licenses, budgets, and resource costs all affect how the cloud should be used. This data must be available to IT and cloud consumers so they can make informed decisions about how and where to deploy workloads. IT, in charge of protecting the business, needs this entire asset; otherwise it is impossible to ensure that the system in the organization is compliant and secure - because you cannot protect what you cannot see.

Put the right tooling in place.

When developing a cloud management strategy, it's important to make sure you have the right tools in place. Successfully managing workloads across various cloud environments isn't possible without a well-defined plan that specifically matches tools and solutions to your organization's cloud needs.

Tools from cloud providers are the first choice with a single cloud strategy, but when planning a hybrid strategy, consistency across cloud environments is an important factor. A third-party cloud management platform can help optimize IT spending, improve the provisioning, and enable self-service capabilities in a consistent manner across hybrid environments.

Let's also not forget that smart organizations recognize which environments are best for certain workloads - whether that be on-premises or in the cloud. Using technology such as Terraform for infrastructure definition and Kubernetes for application orchestration one can keep an application portable and avoid being locked into a specific cloud.

An organization's hybrid cloud strategy should be strategic - not an afterthought. By taking a step back and ensuring the right people, processes, and tooling are in place, organizations can better support and realize the benefits of workloads both in the cloud and on-premises.

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