31 May Hybrid Cloud Examined / ACP Explored
To clarify the definition of Hybrid Cloud in an industry where definitions are as murky as the products themselves
“Hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment which uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms. By allowing workloads to move between private and public clouds as computing needs and costs change, hybrid cloud gives businesses greater flexibility and more data deployment options”
so what does this mean in the brave new world of public cloud transformation? put simply workloads are going to co-exist for the foreseeable future in both domains (on-premise and public cloud) as it simply doesn’t make good business sense to shift the entire workload to public cloud.
The most realistic approach is connecting up to a public cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure through either a VPN (for low utilization workloads) or Express Route (for long term/high use deployments) then after a proof of concept on a low risk workload. Once the mechanics of the deployment are validated and confirm to work/be supportable and fit the desired security approach then consideration should be applied to categorizing/breaking down the current on-premise deployment into tangible workloads supporting line of business applications (e.g. finance / HRM etc)
Once the workloads are categorized then a cost/planning exercise should be undertaken to determine if the approach is a “lift and shift” or in simple terms IaaS play or the application requires modernisation/transformation into a PaaS approach. Generally speaking to use the power of the public cloud through features such as scale-up/elastic etc a PaaS approach will yield the most cost effective model long term although up front there will be a transformation project which needs to be scoped and costed accordingly.
Although high level in detail, this approach is the CT4 transformation model which forms part of the Azure Cloud Physics assessment previously posted, but realistically can be undertaken through any form of programmatic assessment with the right skills base and tools available.