The power of a hybrid cloud strategy
By WP BrandStudio
Both public and private cloud computing have advantages and disadvantages. The best solution may be a blend of both.
Cloud computing has become an integral part of business strategy and enterprise IT architecture over the past decade. Cloud has become pervasive in the search to adopt new business models, extract valuable insights from massive datasets, handle demanding workloads and deliver new products at scale and speed.
But cloud adoption has also introduced new challenges. Businesses and IT decision-makers find themselves choosing between public and private cloud strategies, and while both are similar in the basic approach to infrastructure provisioning and agility, there are significant differences.
Public cloud offers organizations a simplified approach to acquiring and managing infrastructure. Ease of management, speed of deployment and reduction in costs are the top factors favoring public cloud. Public cloud also is increasingly seen as the source of access to new technologies like serverless computing, blockchain, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
But when enterprises use public cloud, there may be justifiable concerns about privacy and security because sensitive data and applications are hosted in third-party, shared infrastructure. Network latency or outages can also become a serious issue in some scenarios. Not all public cloud providers have their own private, high-bandwidth and low-latency WAN.
Private cloud can address some of the public cloud gaps, especially in terms of security, governance and performance. Organizations are typically driven toward private cloud when they want public cloud agility but have tighter security and data compliance–related constraints for their workloads. But a private cloud can also involve substantial up-front hardware and software costs, as well as added operational expense for highly-qualified IT staff.
The initial drivers for each platform are typically well-suited for the type of workloads that initially led to adoption of either a public or a private cloud. The challenges are presented by new requirements that are introduced when expanding the platform to a broader set of applications.
Another complication for businesses in making the public/private choice is that one excels in the other’s shortcomings, making implementation seem impossible without some measure of sacrifice. The optimal solution will include a coordinated approach that uses both public and private cloud resources, offering the best of both worlds.
A hybrid evolution
This complementary nature of capabilities and challenges is driving the growth of hybrid and multi-cloud usage, a mix of public and private clouds that creates a best-of-breed IT environment. For example, a mix of public and private cloud platforms lets organizations use the appropriate platform for compliance and security needs without compromising agility for other workloads or limiting service access for new initiatives or pilot projects. Most current hybrid cloud customers see improvement in security and risk reduction after adoption—the top reported challenge with “all in” public cloud usage.
Another positive factor is the ability to balance scalability needs and budgets with a baseline of predictable and high data transfer operations executed on premises, supplemented with public cloud for rapid scaling and application expansion needs. Services that accelerate growth, such as ready-to-use data analytics services, serverless compute or AI/ML are not as easily available in private cloud. But dedicated, private infrastructure may offer faster testing and qualification time for such applications, relying on existing familiarity with the platform and its security boundaries. Hybrid cloud platforms offer this type of rapid scaling on an as-needed basis without a significant impact on infrastructure budgets and utilization ratios.
A consistent hybrid cloud
While hybrid cloud can eliminate trade-offs and offer the best-of-breed solution, its implementation and management can still be challenging. Different management tools for public and private cloud result in a fragmented IT environment that lacks interoperability and visibility, which is a major challenge at scale. Those enterprises yet to adopt a hybrid cloud believe it’s too costly or too difficult to put together in-house.
The ideal IT architecture would be centered on a “consistent” hybrid cloud that unifies public and private cloud capabilities under one management and operations umbrella. IDC believes the consistent hybrid cloud will let enterprises meet the modernization and agility needs for business-critical workloads and innovation through emerging technologies.
This architecture enables seamless monitoring, management, orchestration and policy-based automation through a unified software. Such consistency helps integrate the public and private cloud environments, enabling a single application deployment pipeline and unified life-cycle management. Cumulatively, these features deliver lower total cost of ownership, higher operational efficiency and faster application deployment cycles without incremental training or fragmentation of the IT infrastructure assets and operations.
The Dell Technologies Cloud solution
Dell Technologies Cloud combines the power of VMware software and Dell EMC infrastructure, and is designed to make hybrid cloud environments easier to operate. This enables a flexible range of IT and management options with tight integration and a single-vendor experience for purchasing, deployment, services and financing. Dell Technologies Cloud gives customers more control with the operational hub of their hybrid clouds on-premises and a consistent cloud infrastructure across all cloud types, both on- and off-premises, with a broad set of 4,200+ cloud providers and hyperscalers.
Dell Technologies Cloud employs familiar VMware tools to provision, govern, automate, and orchestrate applications across multiple cloud deployment options. This gives organizations workload placement flexibility through a single operational hub across public, private, and edge clouds, backed by a broad global network of cloud SPs.
Consistent operations are provided across private and public cloud locations through a common management and orchestration software layer, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation. This means the same VM or container is compatible across various clouds, saving time and cost by eliminating unnecessary application replatforming. In addition, organizations can align how they pay for IT with how they do business through a range of options to buy, rent or consume IT as a service and elastic capacity with metered use.
Enterprises are increasingly facing a do-or-die landscape where cutting-edge technologies such as AI, blockchain and IoT are not optional anymore. To thrive in this climate, executives must wholeheartedly embrace these digital business initiatives and next-generation technologies to maintain a competitive edge and rapidly deliver innovative products at scale. To employ these indispensable tools, enterprises must adopt and invest in a cloud-first and cloud-native architecture—specifically, a consistent hybrid cloud.
This content is paid for by an advertiser and published by WP BrandStudio. The Washington Post newsroom was not involved in the creation of this content. Learn more about WP BrandStudio.
