The paralyzing fear of straddling multiple cloud platforms is due to ‘survivorship bias’. Here’s why we need to look deeper at the myth.
Enterprises are now in the best of times and the worst of times. Advancements in technology have given rise to quickly-changing consumer behavior, forcing businesses to adapt quickly to new business models. However, the advancements also create and enable new streams of revenue, allowing the nimblest of companies to tap on new opportunities quickly and grow.
Today, many organizations are adopting a hybrid cloud strategy to create an infrastructure that allows them to be as agile as possible and adapt to new conditions in the market. According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2019, just 6% of companies have a pure public cloud strategy. On the other end of the spectrum, 7% of respondents are planning to use five or more cloud platforms within the next two years.
While a hybrid approach can help organizations leverage opportunities in today’s economy, some still hold on to certain beliefs that hinder adoption. One of them is that a hybrid cloud infrastructure may cause organizations to lose visibility and control over their IT infrastructure.
Take the platform-first approach
A hybrid cloud architecture combines two or more public or private cloud environments and allows users to tap on clouds interchangeably. Being made up of more than one IT environment, some enterprises fear that a hybrid cloud environment will be challenging for them to monitor and control their systems for security and compliance.
Although transiting to a hybrid cloud environment can come with some teething issues, IT teams can solve the visibility issue by taking a platform-first approach to their operations.
To succeed with hybrid cloud, operational consistency is critical, and a key to operational consistency is the platform. Both hybrid and multicloud users should be able to easily span and interoperate across private and multiple public cloud environments with security and portability.
The operating system that organizations select in hybrid cloud environments is vital to their success. When operating across on-premises and public cloud environments, applications should ideally work the same way. Making sure things like management, compliance and security work the same way across multiple disparate environments is essential.
By having a common operating system to power hybrid cloud environments, organizations can ensure application consistency and portability. This means that those applications will behave the same way, can be managed using the same tools and processes, and accrue the same benefits regardless of whether they are deployed on-premises or in a public cloud. Myth busted via platform-first diligence!
Gaining consistency and control across hybrid cloud with automation
Another reason why enterprises sometimes find hybrid cloud environments challenging is the manual management of their full stack of cloud infrastructure. Although adopting hybrid cloud arrangements can provide enterprises with a broader set of options, the move can also introduce additional complexities.
To help ease this burden by taking complex, time-consuming tasks off the plates of systems administrators and network engineers. The answer is in automation. Besides allowing development teams to focus on core tasks, automation solutions can also ensure consistency in management and help organizations adhere to pre-established policies.
Ascend Money, a fintech company in ASEAN, is an example of companies using automation to gain control of their hybrid cloud infrastructure. By automating its many repetitive manual tasks, it is able to ensure consistency across teams and locations. At the same time, this allows the team to speed up time-to-market while giving the organization the ability to scale as needed to meet customer demands. Myth busted again, via automation diligence!
Gaining business agility with hybrid cloud
While it may in some instances be true that managing a hybrid cloud can present a number of requirements that are not easily addressed with traditional IT management systems, the usual cause is lack of due diligence in cloud infrastructure planning.
Taking on a modern cloud environment requires IT teams to plan their infrastructure properly with a platform-first approach, and also fully exploit adaptable automation tools that specifically address their specific needs in hybrid cloud management.
By taking the right approach and setting up the right automation processes, businesses can bust the myth that hybrid cloud causes visibility and control issues. Instead, they can use the increased flexibility provided by the cloud to succeed in today’s dynamic market conditions.
