Hybrid cloud is emerging as the dominant strategic approach for managing IT and digital transformation, as flexible cloud infrastructure becomes more integrated into mainstream IT systems. This shift has been driven by the realization that implementing and optimizing hybrid environments requires careful planning and ongoing management.
Key considerations in deciding where to place workloads include the best execution venue, data locality, application performance assurance, and overall cost. Enterprises need hybrid environments to support integrated operations across the cloud continuum and ensure consistent service level management throughout the infrastructure and application environment. This necessitates a comprehensive view of workload and application requirements, considering both technological specifications and financial implications, as well as enterprise security, internal governance, and compliance mandates.
Organizations often face skill gaps in cloud platform expertise, leading them to seek external assistance for integrating, managing, and optimizing hybrid private/public infrastructure environments. This includes centralized cloud operations, a single version of truth for resource management, performance monitoring, identity access, and security.
Planning a hybrid strategy involves several steps:
- Application-centric approach: Begin with an operational analysis of the application/workload portfolio, considering processing, storage, latency requirements, dependencies, and operational complexity.
- Business-centric perspective: Layer in business considerations, including cost, security, regulatory/compliance, and business-criticality/data-sensitivity factors that influence workload deployment decisions.
- Addressing the skills gap: Identify areas where internal expertise is lacking and consider engaging with managed or professional services to accelerate implementation and optimize execution. Transform IT skills from infrastructure and product expertise to software skills with knowledge of RESTful API standards.
- Operationalizing the hybrid strategy: Achieve standardization and consistency through centralized monitoring and management of the IT estate, applying unified management to implement workload placement decisions based on organizational-wide or application-specific considerations like security controls, data protection rules, IT governance processes, and resource/cost allocation.
Choosing the right management platform is crucial, ensuring compatibility with legacy workloads alongside cloud-native applications. Developers play a pivotal role in digital-era business supply chains, so the architecture should enable them to build and deploy applications across environments as needed.
The integration of old and new within a common management and operations framework is essential for optimizing IT environments for change while maintaining resilience and security. This aligns with the need for enterprises to develop modernization strategies for legacy workloads, adopt cloud-native approaches for new workloads, and integrate these within a hybrid cloud framework.
NTT Ltd., among others, offers solutions to help manage the complexity of disparate cloud services and environments, guiding organizations towards a consistent, integrated hybrid cloud model with global coverage. The focus is on delivering a seamless, efficient, and secure operational environment that supports digital transformation efforts.
