The Hybrid Cloud – from accident to strategy

There’s no doubt that without the Cloud, most businesses would not have survived “the COVID years.” Of course, businesses were using the Cloud long before 2020, but experts agree that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation by between four and seven years at both organisational and industry levels.

There are both positives and negatives associated with this.

In the frantic early days of the COVID-inspired Cloud migration, one of the easiest, fastest and most straightforward ways to move applications to the Cloud was what we call lift and shift.

It’s easy to see why this method was so popular – you simply had to “lift” an application from its on-premises environment and “shift” it to a Cloud infrastructure without having to make any significant changes to either the application itself or its architecture.

It proved to be an effective way for organisations to adapt at pace to the sudden work-from-home directives from governments around the world.

It was a knee jerk, but necessary response to an unprecedented global calamity no amount of business forecasting or modelling could ever have predicted.

But that was then, this is now.

Increasingly, we’re seeing organisations battling to justify spiralling Cloud costs that have no apparent ROI and which are an unwelcome side effect of earlier unchecked Cloud migration.

Current estimates are that around a third of all Cloud spend is wasted.

But this isn’t the only problem:

1.     A lack of Cloud-native optimisation. When applications aren’t optimised for the Cloud environment, they don’t perform as well as they should and can be difficult to scale.

2.     Security risks. When applications are moved to the Cloud quickly, there is little time for proper security considerations. This leaves them vulnerable to data breaches or other security risks.

3.     Lack of flexibility. Hastily migrated applications might not be able to take full advantage of the scalability and flexibility that the Cloud provides.

As a result, many organisations made the decision to repatriate many of their more mission-critical workloads back to an on-premises infrastructure. Unfortunately, this repatriation, sometimes referred to as reverse Cloud migration or Cloud exit, is not nearly as simple as migrating assets to the Cloud.

In addition to assessing your Cloud environment and deciding which data and applications to move back, it might even be necessary to re-architect the application so that it’s better suited to on-premises infrastructure, and make changes to data management and security protocols.

All of which has resulted in organisations creating what’s become known as the “accidental Hybrid Cloud.” This hodge-podge, Frankencloud is made up of everything from edge to colocation resources, and STaaS to DNS providers.

It’s unwieldy, complex and unnecessarily expensive.

The result?

Businesses are realising that in order to achieve Cloud-driven business benefits, they must take back control of their Cloud migration.

The Hybrid Cloud needs to move from being an unintentional accident to a cohesive business strategy that delivers real value and growth.

The benefits of a strategic Hybrid Cloud approach

Taking a strategic approach to Hybrid Cloud deployment delivers robust advantages for businesses and allows them to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Some of these advantages include:

• Vendor freedom and flexibility – No need to fully commit to a single vendor. Migrate workloads to and from traditional infrastructure and a Public Cloud as needed.
• Cost control – run workloads in the most suitable Cloud environment for security, cost-effectiveness and reliability.
• Scalability and agility – Hybrid Cloud’s range of resource options means you can deploy, scale and provision resources according to demand.
• Compliance – certain organisations operate in highly regulated environments with strict restrictions on where data can reside. Hybrid Cloud means you can keep sensitive data in a private data centre and operate other workloads in the Cloud. So, you get the benefit of Cloud elasticity without compromising regulatory requirements.
• Resilience – Hybrid Cloud allows you to run workloads redundantly in both Public and Private environments.

Of course, this all sounds ideal on paper, but one critical question remains:

How do you know which workloads to migrate to the Cloud, and which to keep on premises?

It’s an important question to answer, because when you have an optimal data storage and management solution in place, it’s easy to extract maximum value from your data, no matter where it’s stored.

At CoCre8, we believe successfully leveraging the Hybrid Cloud means shifting your strategy from Cloud-first to workload-first.

The workload-first strategy offers a tailored suit in a world of off-the-rack solutions. It prioritises business needs, and ensures each workload is optimised for performance, cost, and security.

This is a topic we’ll investigate more thoroughly in a separate blog, but here are three key guidelines:

1.     Know your data architecture. It’s the foundation for optimal workload placement.

2.     Prioritise the alignment of your resources with specific business needs.

3.     Embrace bespoke solutions over one-size-fits-all approaches.

Getting these right needs detailed consideration, and not all tech partners have the skills and experience to do this.

In partnership with Fujitsu, CoCre8 can help you:

• Select the right architecture based on workload requirements.
• Choose the delivery model for each application.
• Integrate the data architecture across all physical and virtual locations.
• Define security and risk measures for corporate data.
• Analyse key factors such as cost-efficiency, ROI, application performance, scalability, real-time or near real-time data requirements, data sensitivity, number of users, distribution, legal requirements, data protection requirements, and many other aspects.

Make Fujitsu Hybrid Cloud the foundation of your business evolution, work with us and build a digitally resilient enterprise that’s protected against uncertainty.