HYBRID cloud has come to mean different things over time. One early canonical document from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) focused on quickly and transparently moving workloads between a private cloud and a public one.
This turned out to be both too narrow a definition and often not feasible because of the difficulty and cost of moving around large volumes of data. In fact, the recent interest in edge computing, in part, reflects the need to move computing closer to data and users.
In this article, we will cover some key considerations to keep in mind when one starts to digitally transform an organisation.
Consistency and integration across different computing footprints remains important. However, today’s hybrid clouds are really about having a mix of new and old development processes to support traditional architectures and new applications.
Increasingly, organisations want choices when deciding where to build and run their applications to meet business demands.
One driving force is that while many are moving some traditional workloads to the cloud, they cannot do it all at once.
They need to be able to use their existing technology, make sure that the applications they build today are going to be relevant in the future, and flexibly adapt those apps as business needs change.
Organisations need the ability to run their applications on their choice of footprints, with common development, operations, and automation environments, as appropriate.
Hybrid cloud goes beyond infrastructure
This highlights how an effective hybrid cloud is not just about infrastructure. (People sometimes distinguish between a hybrid cloud and multiple cloud silos, referring to the latter as multi-cloud. However, this is getting into an inconsistently used definitional rabbit hole and is therefore best avoided.)
Take automation for example. Automation is increasingly no longer seen as a tool or just a tactical solution. It is becoming a strategic initiative for IT and the business.
Automation is now necessary because manual processes simply cannot handle the scale of modern computing infrastructures either efficiently or reliably, nor can those manual processes prevent the operation of multiple clouds from devolving into inconsistent and incompatible operational procedures.
Security is top priority
Data governance and security are also important considerations in a hybrid cloud as they are elsewhere. In fact, the Red Hat’s Global Tech Outlook 2021 survey found that security was the top IT funding priority with 45% of IT decision makers making that their pick. Companies need to protect their data everywhere it exists by using a layered defense strategy.
Companies should first identify where all of the sensitive data resides and categorize this data based on its sensitivity and regulatory requirements.
This may lead to deciding that certain data should be stored on-premise or at least in-country. It’s important to work closely with privacy teams to make sure there is alignment around data privacy and governance. Encryption and other tools should then be deployed to protect data at rest and in motion.
Automation plays a role here as well. Checking to make sure systems are compliant with industry regulations is a tedious and error-prone task that is often done manually.
This has become even more complicated with workloads living on-premise, in multiple public clouds, and out to systems in edge locations that may not even have local IT staff.
Automation helps abstract away the complexity of a heterogeneous IT stack, while ensuring that security, compliance, and optimisation challenges are consistently and routinely identified and addressed.
Effective hybrid clouds are based on enterprise open source
A hybrid cloud approach is at its most effective when it builds on top of enterprise open source products. These provide code portability and integration across disparate cloud environments so software will work similarly across all IT environments.
Open source and open standards allow applications and data to consistently move from one environment to another. By contrast, in closed systems, customers have flexibility only within that system.
Flexible enterprise IT is based on an open architecture, which is an architecture that is not constrained to a fixed set of principles or technologies. An open architecture enables customers to more easily adopt agile and DevOps (a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations) methodologies, which can improve collaboration and accelerate application delivery.
This brings us to digital transformation. Without applications and collaboration and enterprise open source one cannot digitally transform even though that is increasingly a requirement for effective digital businesses.
We have also asked IT decision makers around the world to identify their top uses of enterprise open source in The State of Enterprise Open Source 2021 report.
Their top three responses:
- IT infrastructure modernisation;
- Application development, and;
- Digital transformation.
This requires the right modern infrastructure in place.
The past year has seen businesses experiment with and adopt many changes to quickly adapt to much more distributed workforces and customers.
Many are aspects of digital transformation, which the aforementioned Red Hat’s Global Tech Outlook 2021 survey found had accelerated in 21% of the organisations surveyed.
Digital transformation covers many facets of how an organisation operates, including its overall culture but—without overemphasising the technology aspects—it does require certain technology building blocks including applications, automation, and computing infrastructure on which everything else depends.
It requires a hybrid cloud that can flexibly support the workloads that the business needs to succeed. – Dec 25, 2021
Gordon Haff is the senior principal product marketing manager for Red Hat.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Focus Malaysia.
