In a 2021 survey, 95% of respondents agreed that a hybrid cloud is critical for success, and 86% plan to invest more in hybrid multicloud.
Hybrid multicloud has emerged as the new design center for organizations of all sizes. Rather than purchasing costly infrastructure upfront to accommodate future growth, the hybrid multicloud helps you scale up and down as needed and right-size your environment. Deploying data and workloads in this model offers the potential for incredible value, including improved agility, functionality, cost savings, performance, cloud security, compliance, sustainability, disaster recovery—the list goes on.
However, enjoying the benefits of hybrid multicloud requires organizations to first overcome a variety of challenges. I’ll share some of these challenges as well as practices and recommendations to help your organization realize the full value of your investment.
Challenge 1: Mindset
The cloud isn’t as much a place to go as it is a way of operating. When organizations move from on-premises to hybrid multicloud, it requires a shift in mindset and protocols—an important concept for organizations to embrace. Many of the tools, skillsets, and processes used on-premises must evolve to those used in the cloud. Your applications may need to be refactored. In a word, your organization must adapt its way of operating to maximize the value of hybrid multicloud.
Challenge 2: Compliance
Compliance poses another challenge. Wherever your organization puts data, it must comply with industry regulations. Moving data later can rack up expensive egress charges. In advance, your organization must carefully consider where data needs to reside physically and how you will ensure compliance, maintain visibility, and report on your compliance posture.
Challenge 3: Security
The same is true for cloud security, which is always top of mind for organizations. Your organization must make security as robust as possible across storage, network, compute, and people—essentially every layer. This means that if you’re operating under zero-trust policies, you need to understand how that impacts your hybrid multicloud model.
Challenge 4: Cost optimization
While hybrid multicloud can be incredibly cost-effective, understanding and managing costs across providers and usage can prove incredibly complex. Make sure that by design, you’re addressing cloud cost optimization challenges upfront, narrowing the focus to minimize complexity while ensuring interoperability. Implement cloud FinOps tools and processes to maximize your investments by enabling broad visibility and cost control across hybrid multicloud. When evaluating cloud provider lock-in, tread carefully to ensure it supports your strategy as a business.
Challenge 5: Disaster recovery
Organizations often see disaster recovery as the low-hanging fruit of the hybrid multicloud journey because it eliminates a second data center full of depreciating and idle equipment. Because the way your organization handles disaster recovery changes, you may choose to extend the products you already have. You might add new approaches and tooling. Regardless, you need a plan in place before you make this transition.
Challenge 6: Dependencies
Understanding and addressing workloads and dependencies across your infrastructure is fundamental to minimizing the risk of issues and outages. Previous methodologies may not apply in hybrid multicloud, especially when it comes to common cloud attributes such as services and self-service automation. That means you must complete application services dependency mapping as part of assessment and planning activities. This work includes determining which applications need to be refactored or modernized to achieve performance objectives and operate efficiently.
Challenge 7: Skillsets
Not surprisingly, the skillsets required to support hybrid multicloud differ from those needed to support a traditional on-premises environment. Ensuring your organization has the right skillsets to support this work can be challenging. Therefore, it’s essential to understand the necessary toolsets and skills so you can put a plan in place for addressing training gaps and potentially supplementing staff.
Accelerate your hybrid multicloud journey
Moving to hybrid multicloud is a highly complex endeavor that when done well, can pay off in spades for your organization. A successful journey requires careful, detailed planning that takes these and other challenges into account. The more challenges you solve on the front end, the faster and more effective your transition will be on the back end.
GDT has been accelerating customer success for more than 26 years, helping countless customers streamline their hybrid cloud journeys. Our experts provide architecture, advisory, design, deployment, and management services, all customized to your specific needs, providing you a secure and cost-effective infrastructure that can flex and scale as business requirements change.
Contact the experts at GDT to see how we can help your business streamline your hybrid multicloud journey.
