Setting Up Success With a Hybrid Cloud Solution

In the early days of cloud migration, enterprises rarely intended to set up a hybrid cloud solution. Rather, they experimented with cloud solutions, and as they stumbled their way through a cloud implementation strategy, they found that a hybrid cloud environment struck the right balance between innovation, security and cost savings.

Today, enterprises are more likely to pursue a hybrid cloud environment. Or they may originally intend to choose a single cloud provider in order to gain cost advantages, but a merger or acquisition introduces a hybrid structure. Sometimes, a company that uses a single public cloud will require integration with a customer via public or private cloud solutions.

Whether enterprises set out to implement single, multi or hybrid cloud environments, they should be familiar with the considerations:

Cloud-Native Hybrid Solutions: During the first wave of migrations, enterprises largely conducted what’s referred to as a “lift-and-shift”: moving virtual machines of applications from their own data center to a cloud platform. Now enterprises are engaging in Wave 2 of migrations, with companies recognizing that when application development is cloud-native, there are certain advantages. Refactoring and architecting applications allow them to feature the inherent benefits of cloud technology and capture optimized business outcomes.

Variable Workloads: One of the factors enterprise IT must keep in mind is the potential for hybrid cloud solutions to handle variable workloads. Private cloud can handle everyday workloads, while enterprises utilize public cloud for burst workloads to reduce costs. This makes it easy to automatically scale for seasonality or promotions that impact workload capacity. It’s an ideal solution for applications that generally receive minimal traffic and can handle some initial latency.

Workload Placement: IT can assign different workloads and applications based on the platform that is most suitable and cost-effective. It may be less expensive to run collaboration workloads, artificial intelligence, and machine learning applications in different clouds. Enterprises can sometimes identify significant cost savings through strategic workload placement.

Capacity Management: Even when using a hybrid cloud environment, IT still needs to manage the same factors around capacity growth and infrastructure as with an on-site data center. IT management needs to start small and build in controls that prevent cloud sprawl.

Cloud Costs: Cloud usage and spending should be closely monitored. Public cloud solutions offer ease and convenience, which make them an attractive part of any hybrid environment. Those same features often lead to sprawl and unnecessary spending. Some enterprises find that a cloud cost management tool is helpful to track all cloud costs in a central location.Contemplating the right cloud environment for your enterprise can lead to a lot of questions. If you’re debating whether a hybrid cloud solution might be a good option, contact us at AMD Technology. We can answer your questions and help you determine the ideal solution.