Chris Blow, Technical Design Architect at Daisy Corporate Services discusses the benefits of migrating to hybrid cloud, common hybrid cloud scenarios, and why businesses should consider hybrid cloud adoption.
In this blog:
- Hybrid cloud migration – hype or hope?
- Why choose hybrid cloud?
- Hybrid cloud scenarios and examples
- CloudBridge [Video]: Daisy Corporate Service’s hybrid cloud solution
When it comes to the cloud, every organisation’s requirements are different. We all know the advantages that come with migrating to a cloud environment – boosting efficiency and productivity, reducing cost, flexibility, future-proofing, the list goes on.
Even with this in mind, many large organisations, often with complex legacy workloads running exclusively on-premise, are still wary and deem it to be too risky and complicated to migrate these to the cloud.
That is why many need bespoke solutions and guidance to figure out what kind of cloud strategy and migration is most suitable for their workloads such as email systems, finance applications, databases, and CRM systems.
This blog discusses the benefits of hybrid cloud and then lists some scenarios which are common among businesses seeking hybrid cloud adoption.
Hybrid cloud migration – hype or hope?
In a hybrid cloud architecture, public, private and on-premise workloads and resources remain distinct but are tied together under one common data management. You can connect business-critical workloads or apps containing sensitive data which run on traditional architectures and aren’t suitable for public cloud by using a software-defined approach, providing a common set of data services across a combination of resources.
To meet these challenges, we’re seeing many businesses looking to move into the cloud arena via a step-by-step approach – utilising a hybrid cloud architecture as that first step.
Why choose hybrid cloud?
1. Keeping pace with technology
Workloads and business processes are fundamental to your organisation’s success. And whether these are databases, web apps, legacy on-premise apps, file services, customer-facing or back-office systems, they must all run efficiently, uninterrupted and securely. Keeping your IT architecture both secure and at the leading edge can make all the difference between growth/market share acquisition and losing out to the competition.
Adopting cloud technology can quickly establish a competitive advantage by offering up some or all of the benefits below.
2. Cost savings
There are many cost advantages associated with hybrid cloud adoption, but the main benefit surrounds efficiency. In conventional server farms, private cloud or on-premise, there can be a large discrepancy in the amount of infrastructure needed to run an organisation’s workflows.
Long story short, the amount of IT infrastructure (VMs /containers) required to run the organisation’s workloads needs to be enough to run the peak usage at any time. This means that all the time this infrastructure is not running at peak capacity, there is under-utilised IT infrastructure waste.
This is true for both private and on-premise. In a hybrid architecture, however, efficiencies can be found by reducing the amount of on-premise or private infrastructure to the average amount of usage and allocating any bursts up to the peak usage to public cloud. In this way, the peak costs only have to be paid for as they occur (whenever usage peaks above the on-premise or private capability), creating cost efficiencies and reducing wasted resource.
Migrating to a hybrid cloud environment can drive cost savings. However, the primary value lies in supporting a fast-moving digital business transformation. Most organisations run under two agendas: IT and business transformation. Historically IT has been focused on saving money, whereas digital business transformation is focused on investments and ROI.
3. Agility
The most significant advantage of migrating to a hybrid cloud solution is agility. In this case, agility is the necessity to react to changes in the business environment enabling an organisation to alter course quickly – a fundamental principle of digital business. Your enterprise may wish (or need) to combine public, private, and on-premises resources to achieve the agility necessary to create a competitive advantage.
In today’s digital age, organisations are turning to digital devices, software and apps to respond to the increasing wants and needs of their customers, employees and stakeholders to be able to interact online. This, in turn, has created an unquenchable thirst for faster development, deployment, and delivery, putting unprecedented strain on organisations’ infrastructures and pushing them to develop strategies which can support rapid innovation, iteration, agility and scalability.
Organisations must look to new technology in order to incorporate and harness it to meet this demand. Virtualisation and hybrid cloud architectures make this possible while at the same time offering cost savings, better performance, scalability, greater capacity and even improved security, whilst providing efficiency and productivity benefits across the organisation.
Furthermore, organisations can now deploy and run apps without running the risk of being locked into the changing APIs of specific cloud providers while being able to access infrastructure at any time with one single set of tools and interfaces.
Whatever your reason for moving to the cloud, a hybrid cloud architecture gives you this flexibility and freedom.
4. Making employees more effective by increasing productivity
Cloud computing offers many business benefits. Employees can set up what is essentially a virtual office, giving them the flexibility to connect and communicate with your business from anywhere and at any time. If staff would like access to business information while they’re off-site, they can connect with their virtual workplace quickly and effectively.
Collaboration in a cloud environment offers staff the flexibility to communicate and share work more productively. Additional business advantages include reduced IT prices, scalability, business continuity, flexibility and automatic updates to ensure you stay future-ready.
5. Scalability
Allowing your architecture to scale with you can be a challenge for any business. But employing a hybrid cloud model offers the scalability and flexibility by combining private and public cloud, allowing your architecture to be designed to scale when the demand is required. Daisy’s CloudBridge solution has the capability to optimise your workloads, making sure that you aren’t paying for something you aren’t using.
6. OPEX flexibility
Businesses moving to an OPEX utility-based service within public cloud often find it hard to keep control of costs. But by utilising an external partner, CloudBridge has the capability to show precisely where your costs are attributed, enabling you to make critical decisions around where your workloads reside.
Moving your IT services to CloudBridge couldn’t be simpler, and will be completed over various stages from review, design to implementation. Daisy’s highly-skilled technology-certified consultants and architects are available to advise and guide you through a successful migration, keeping disruption to a minimum for all of your users. Our consultants and architects all have real-life experience in migrating services to the CloudBridge platform.
Hybrid cloud scenarios and examples
1. Dynamic, sensitive or frequently changeable workloads
In this scenario, you can keep your sensitive or more predictable workloads on-premise or in private cloud whilst placing your dynamic changing workloads in a public cloud.
2. Processing Big Data for machine learning and analytics
Big Data analysis and analytics are rarely running constantly, which makes them great candidates for public cloud utilisation. Keep your sensitive data in a private or on-premise infrastructure behind your firewall, whilst performing big data analytics and machine learning in a public cloud space where you only pay for what you use.
3. Step-by-step cloud strategy implementation
In this scenario, small steps are taken to mitigate the risk of cloud adoption. Some workloads can be placed in a private cloud setting or, depending on the workload, in a public cloud. This can be analysed and then the next step can be taken to increase the cloud footprint as necessary whilst ensuring these infrastructures work together.
4. Short-term and temporary projects
Instead of investing in additional infrastructure for temporary use, you could allocate short-term projects to public cloud in a hybrid cloud architecture, again only paying for what you use.
5. Future-ready and flexible
Today’s needs are not the same as tomorrow’s and none of us can predict what the future may bring. Hybrid cloud environments allow organisations to scale up and down with their data needs and a mixture of private, public and on-premise make handling rapid change easier and more secure.
6. Because why not?
Although there may not be an immediate need or reason to move to hybrid cloud, why limit your options? Having the option and flexibility to be able to move workloads across infrastructure and react quickly to both internal and external changes when needed may prove to be useful at a time when you would otherwise be without it. Better to have the option than not.
CloudBridge: Daisy Corporate Service’s hybrid cloud solution
Whether you are just getting started with cloud, or you are already an expert, we can help. By providing guidance from consultation to implementation and managed services, our cloud experts are on hand to help you achieve your goals.
CloudBridge is built on technology from market leaders – both at a hardware and software level. Our UK data centres are moving into the world of “software-defined” through the whole technology stack, enabling us to deliver bespoke services to our clients leveraging the power of true orchestration and automation.
This article was written by Chris Blow, Technical Design Architect at Daisy Corporate Services.