Primary Opportunities of Multi Hybrid Cloud Adoption
Companies, especially large-scale ones, are rapidly embracing dynamic cloud services, viz. Hybrid and multi-cloud platforms due to their exceptional benefits. These cloud infrastructures not only offer scalability, flexibility, and cost optimization but also proliferates your IT workflows.
However, switching from on-prem static platform to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure comes with myriads of challenges for IT, security, developers, and networking teams.
Here are nine main aspects that CIOs must consider before taking on Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption:
Amongst enterprise IT, cloud computing has become one of the rapidly-growing IT spend elements. But greater the IT spend, the more will be the responsibility for enterprises to use it correctly. Otherwise, unsuitable investments may cause monetary loss.
1. Cost Optimization is a must
Consider Cost Optimization capabilities as a significant force to drive your multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption journey.
With time, cloud vendors need to hone up their native optimization abilities to provide a cost-effective infrastructure to organizations that can deliver optimal performance.
In the future, the third-party cost optimization tools will continue to expand, and this market will indeed evolve significantly, especially for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Future applications are likely to use hi-tech data analytics tools for enhanced cost optimization without compromising consistency and performance.
Enterprise IT needs to consider cost optimization opportunities as a core element of their multi-cloud projects. Honing up technical skills, utilizing advanced data analytics tools, and leveraging native optimization opportunities can help them maximize cost savings.
2. Re-platforming cloud infrastructure
The biggest challenge for enterprises that want to migrate to multi-cloud is re-platforming technologies. Mostly across a private data center, there’s too much standardization as enterprises take a homogeneous approach in this environment.
But hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures are API-driven, each utilizing different sets of APIs. Hence, one of the main challenges to cloud adoption is the diversity of how these platforms use different APIs.
Another opportunity is the process shift. Traditional private data centers have a time-consuming pipeline, delivering poor customer experience.
3. Provisioning assets for multi and hybrid cloud infrastructure
When provisioning cloud resources, it is easier to provision assets just for the initial stage of operations, such as servers, VMs, containers, etc. But this approach isn’t efficient in the long run.
Businesses need to consider the entire development lifecycle of products/services in the hybrid cloud infrastructure. Full lifecycle viz. provisioning, developing, patching, upgrades, scaling up/scaling down, new version deployments, etc. - every single stage of the pipeline must be considered when provisioning assets for hybrid cloud.
4. Security Measures
The next major challenge for the security team is collaborating with the ops team to safeguard the entire hybrid cloud infrastructure, and we know it's a tough nut to crack.
Securing cloud infrastructure is not only about protecting underlying infrastructures but also about applications themselves. Spanning multiple environments and integrating security into every single stage of the application development pipeline is a must.
DevSecOps culture is an exceptional opportunity for businesses to integrate security right into the initial development stage into its final deployment to multiple environments. Securing and encrypting data at rest as well as data in transit is the central aspect here.
5. Capacity Augmentation
Enterprises adopting multi-hybrid cloud may have investments spanning public and on-premise data centers.
In a hybrid cloud infrastructure, enterprise IT often feels the need to shift workloads between public cloud infrastructure and On-Prem data center. For this, the resources in the data center are often freed up to make space for newer deployments.
In hybrid infrastructure, IT teams might run applications locally during peak times and then shift them to the public cloud infrastructure to deploy local resources. One great example of this is employee performance appraisal application, which is seasonal and only in demand once a year at its peak time.
While shifting traditional VM-based workloads is easier, moving Kubernetes applications to a target environment with automation is definitely more challenging.
6. Data Portability
Data portability is one of the core reasons why enterprises across the globe are widely adopting cloud-native architecture. Today, businesses are making use of Kubernetes to move applications across different deployment environments, but that is only limited to stateless applications.
Kubernetes is capable of abstracting resources such as storage, network, and compute, which disintegrates applications from their virtual or physical infrastructure. It is a powerful tool to port your cloud-native applications, thereby allowing enterprises to “write code once, and run anywhere.”
7. Vendor Lock-in
Multi-cloud infrastructure increases the independence of enterprises off cloud vendors. In reality, very few businesses are focused on portability, while most of them are looking for robust multi-cloud strategies for functionality, procurement, and risk mitigation.
CIOs wanting to adopt a multi-cloud approach must focus on their core concerns such as risk mitigation, reducing vendor lock-ins, increasing risk appetite, and so on.
8. Lack of technical skills delay cloud migrations
Lack of cloud IaaS skills tends to delay the process of migrating to hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure by a period of a few years. Today, cloud migration is more about leveraging and shifting instead of modernizing or restructuring. But, the lift-and-shift approach won’t hone up the native cloud skills, rather it will only reduce opportunities for service providers to train and certify cloud professionals.
To avoid this shortage of cloud professionals, enterprises must look for ways to migrate workloads to the cloud via renowned managed service providers. Choosing expert SIs and managed service providers known for their successful cloud migration projects will offer better cost savings without compromising IT performance.
9. Expanded service availability
In the upcoming years, distributed cloud platforms are likely to support expanded service availability. Prominent cloud service providers plan to build distributed ATM-like access points that will act as a subset of their services for low-latency applications needs. This will allow them to bring their services closer to the users demanding access.
With this approach, even “micro data centers” will be strategically built in areas where a higher number of users congregate, whereas “pop-up” cloud sub-services will fulfill temporary requirements, such as sports or other entertainment events.
Specific locations will have equipment installed that support a subset of public cloud services, closer to the point of customer demand. This aims to support the low-latency requirements of applications using them. Thus, these applications don’t really need to have a separate infrastructure, but they can directly run from the cloud service providers’ native services. Such ATM-like cloud service points are a use case of edge computing, which is only expected to grow in a few years.
Wrap Up:
As this digital era continues to evolve, CIOs and enterprise IT need to consider these trends as growth opportunities to drive their cloud adoption and migration plans in upcoming years. Taking wise and strategic steps now will only prepare them to solidify their IT integrity with hybrid and multi-cloud adoption.
In-house cloud skills will be a defining factor of enterprise agility, including their ability to deploy cloud services where user demand is at its peak, on the edge as well as on-premises.
All the opportunities mentioned above will significantly impact cloud adoption in the year 2020 and the successive ones. CIOs need to accordingly plan their cloud strategies and strive to evolve in their cloud adoption journey.
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