How to leverage the full potential of hybrid cloud to your advantage

In the last two years, resilience has become a clear and desirable attribute for organizations. In the quest for improved resilience, the cloud has emerged as a powerful option. Within the cloud ecosystem, the hybrid cloud has become extremely popular, as it enables organizations to gradually transition and re-architect their on-premises applications to the cloud. For many organizations, the hybrid cloud model is hence a stepping stone to the public cloud, and organizations have the flexibility of choosing an on-premises ecosystem or a public cloud platform, depending on the performance expected and the cost of running the workload.

Business continuity, resilience, and the ability to adapt to change have been pushed to the forefront of the boardroom agenda, and in a bid to deliver on those objectives, hybrid cloud has become a core enabler of the business strategy. For example, 93.7% of organizations surveyed in the 2021 NTT Hybrid Cloud report, agree it is critical to meeting their immediate business needs. Yet, despite its overwhelming benefits, it can be complex if not approached correctly. Further, adoption of hybrid cloud is further complicated by changing regulatory and compliance obligations. Different regions, countries, and industries have varying legal expectations. No wonder risk and compliance services are the most valued skills sought from service providers.

Recommended best practices

As stated above, hybrid cloud does bring in a number of challenges. Some recommended best practices include:

# Build in Security

For many enterprises, security is the first consideration in vendor selection for hybrid cloud. With heightened prominence, not to mention the significant investment it commands, security has moved from being a cost center to being a transformation enabler. With both public and third-party private cloud proving increasingly popular environments to host applications and workloads, comes the added notion of a larger attack surface area to secure. Security is ultimately a shared responsibility. It’s also an experience enabler, which is why these skills are prized by businesses everywhere.  Hence, it is vital to view security as a transformation enabler to better improve application experiences for both customers and employees. Security is a critical element of hybrid cloud strategy, and poorly designed, insecure applications will impact experience, brand reputation, and revenue. Security has to be built into digital programs from the very start.

#Modernize your applications

Transform your applications by using industry proven methodologies and processes to support your cloud-native development and modernization. No matter where your enterprise is on your transformation journey, begin with a consultative-led approach to evaluate your current ‘as-is’ operating state and then identify your target ‘to-be’ state.

# Network Performance

While performance efficiencies and reduced costs are big motivators in driving hybrid cloud adoption, elements of both can be barriers. Network performance and availability are regarded as sizeable barriers to hybrid cloud adoption, with issues around networks not being properly architected to support a hybrid IT environment impacting organizational performance. An underperforming network will undo the benefits cloud offers, impacting the availability of data and applications and thus, user experiences.For a hybrid cloud strategy to be fully effective, it’s vital the network is well architected to meet the needs of modern-day infrastructure, particularly if it was designed and deployed pre-cloud. Older networks simply won’t cope with the new requirements brought about by a cloud operating environment. Modern network architectures make use of software-defined networking technology, network virtualization, and consistent service insertion across on-premises and cloud platforms. It brings the network from the hardware world into the software world, enabling greater automation and provisioning network resources on-demand, similar to the way cloud resources are provisioned. Organizations should focus on network services that deliver predictable and acceptable application performance no matter where the application resides, or where users connect from, in a cost-effective and secure manner

# Optimize infrastructure operations for cloud success

Infrastructure is a critical consideration in your hybrid cloud journey, ensuring applications and data located on-premises and in colocation facilities perform well as part of an end-to-end hybrid approach. Utilizing next-generation data centers, for example, gives your users the best possible experience through increased performance of applications. You can also take advantage of the continuous innovation of a fully managed and optimized cloud environment.

# Partner with a proven MSP

A significant shortage of skills and the complexities of implementing a hybrid cloud environment, not to mention the significant time, cost, and resource required, can make it more efficient to engage with a partner to help design, build and manage a hybrid strategy. Using a partner means tapping into external, expert resources to bolster or complement existing skill sets. It helps improve the predictability of IT spend and makes budget planning easier.

The virtues of using a partner are clear when data repatriation is concerned. The NTT 2021 Hybrid Cloud report uncovered that 45.1% of organizations intend to repatriate data back to its country of origin, to save costs, minimize vendor lock-in, or because of political considerations, laws, or regulations. This can be a complex process, and for which the skills of a partner can prove invaluable. Enterprises turn to partners due to the extreme depth of capabilities and the full stack of solutions on offer, particularly system integrators. For example, the report highlights that 70.0% of organizations look for risk and compliance services to support their hybrid cloud plans, while business continuity/disaster recovery (64.6%) is the second most common capability sought – in line with wider business objectives and a common perspective across almost every industry vertical. MSPs also have proven blueprints that not only help in implementing a hybrid cloud transition effectively, but also in providing continuous service improvement and optimization.

In conclusion, while business continuity and business resilience are fundamental, improving customer experiences and growing revenues still features highly on the list of business objectives. As such, leaders need to be accelerators of technology, from strategy through to deployment. Hybrid cloud provides a way to achieve this goal by speeding up processes, encouraging collaboration, and providing cost-effective solutions to free up IT effective solutions to free up IT budget for growth, transformation, and innovation.

The article has been written by Karan Kirpalani, Cloud Head, NTT Ltd. in India