Research from a recent Gartner study predicts that by 2019, \u201cmore than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors\u2019 new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only\u201d. The study considers the idea that \u201ccloud-first, and even cloud-only is replacing the no-cloud attitude\u201d that has dominated corporations in recent years. With there being no preference between public or private cloud, it indicates that organisations are moving in the direction of a hybrid cloud future.<\/p>\n
Hybrid cloud is a combination of on-premises and off-premises (or cloud based) IT infrastructure platforms. Enabling an organisation to run applications on multiple platforms increases efficiency and choice, as no one platform is right for everything. \u00a0A hybrid approach allows an organisation to choose the right platform for the right workload, for the right price.\u00a0 This agility speeds up \u2018time to market\u2019 for many organisations, and improves the capabilities to service employees and customers.<\/p>\n
This shift is, in some ways, a no brainer in the medium term, however it is not without challenges and risks. It\u2019s difficult for organisations used to \u2018on premises\u2019 single vendor or single platform architectures to build, manage and protect hybrid cloud environments.\u00a0 While introducing multiple platforms drives efficiency and choice, it also drives complexity and risk for organisations ill prepared to address this shift in strategy correctly. \u00a0Given these concerns, if you are considering a move towards a hybrid cloud environment, what should you consider and how do you get there?<\/p>\n
There are advantages to choosing a hybrid cloud environment from an efficiency standpoint. Lower costs, pay as you go models, and access to a wide breadth of services summarise some of the broad positive outcomes. These outcomes enable businesses to run tests, build new systems, and adapt faster. Best of all, organisations can be quicker to market.<\/p>\n
However, it\u2019s important to consider that the changes required to enable a hybrid cloud can be risky and time consuming, so you may need a different group of tools to protect the environments that are created. To address and avoid risk, protection and immediate recovery is key.<\/p>\n
Traditional migration and disaster recovery methods that are based on individual pieces of hardware can be disruptive to the production systems they protect and are no longer adequate in the hybrid cloud or multi-platform world. These traditional replication, migration and recovery tools are by design incapable of protecting applications and environments that may span multiple \u2018on-premises\u2019 and cloud platforms.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no surprise that traditional ways of protecting applications in \u201con-premises-only\u201d environments won\u2019t suffice in the hybrid cloud world.\u00a0 Thus, we believe there are important things to consider when planning\u00a0the shift towards a hybrid cloud environment that will reduce the risk and prevent environmental exposure and complexity.<\/p>\n
Planning:<\/strong> Planning is significantly easier if your environment has a protection, mobility, and testing suite or platform that is agnostic to the infrastructure you\u2019re running your IT on. By design, you can make changes to which platforms you use (on-premises and\/or cloud based) with no protection dependencies tied to that individual on-premises or cloud platform. Furthermore, an agnostic platform allows you to avoid introducing organisational risk when making changes, thus providing the agility desired when deciding to move to a hybrid cloud IT environment in the first place.<\/p>\n Testing:<\/strong> Any changes to your environment, whether internal on-premises changes or more complex shifts to cloud based resources, will carry organisational risk.\u00a0 Thus, testing whether changes will be executed smoothly and successfully is the bedrock of any serious hybrid-cloud strategy.\u00a0 Downtime, data loss, and the costs associated with infrastructure changes can be significant risks an organisation moving to hybrid cloud needs to consider. \u00a0A successful hybrid cloud environment can be enabled by, and will continue to allow for testing capabilities that can assess whether the applications absorbing infrastructure or platform change will remain available through and after those changes occur.<\/p>\n Future proofing:<\/strong> When introducing new platforms into your IT environment, future proofing your decisions is critical.\u00a0 Questions such as \u2018can we protect our applications once they are moved to a new<\/p>\n private\/hybrid\/public cloud platform?\u2019 and \u2018if this new platform doesn\u2019t meet our expectations, can we move again easily?\u2019 are very important considerations to think through before any changes are actually made.<\/p>\n There are numerous advantages to having a hybrid cloud. If you do your due diligence and take the right steps to get there, you\u2019ll find the rewards can be significant from both a cost as well as efficiency standpoint.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Research from a recent Gartner study predicts that by 2019, \u201cmore than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors\u2019 new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only\u201d. The study considers the idea that \u201ccloud-first, and even cloud-only is replacing the no-cloud attitude\u201d that has dominated corporations in recent years. With there being no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disaster-recovery-cybersecurity-news-malaysia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microdium.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}By Peter Godden<\/h4>\n