By Saju Sankarankutty, Vice President and Unit Technology Officer, Cloud, Infosys
The landscape of cloud adoption has evolved today, with many enterprises using more than one cloud. According to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud, and 87% a hybrid cloud strategy. Given this trend, let’s understand hybrid and multi-clouds and how organizations can get started on this roadmap.
What are Hybrid and Multi-Clouds?
A hybrid cloud is an architectural solution that combines private and public cloud services. Many organizations host applications that contain sensitive and confidential data on a private cloud but use public cloud for customer-facing applications.
A multi-cloud is a solution that combines services offered by multiple cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS). Organizations use different public clouds to leverage a variety of feature sets. However, it can get cumbersome to manage different clouds and integrate them seamlessly.
On the ground, organizations use a mix of hybrid and multi-cloud approaches. For this discussion, let’s use the term “hybrid clouds” to define a combination of these two architectures.
How do Hybrid Clouds Add Value to Enterprises?
Enterprises migrate to the cloud to take advantage of its scalable resources, on-the-shelf services, and cost savings. However, a one-size-fits-all approach does not work as most of them have a vast IT architectural landscape with many application types.
A typical enterprise has three broad workload categories:
1. End-user and productivity applications: These are the front-line customer-facing applications. As users need to access them from any location or device, these apps have to be hosted on a public cloud.
2. Business support applications: These are the non-differentiated in-house applications such as CRM and payroll used by organizations. As the audience is internal, these apps can reside on private clouds set up exclusively for your organization.
3. Line of business applications: This refers to a system of record (example, database systems) and system of engagement (example, customer analytics systems) applications. These can be on private or public clouds based on specific use cases. You may host an analytics application on a public cloud that offers machine learning libraries but retain confidential data lakes in a private cloud.
Hybrid clouds offer businesses the flexibility to support each of these workload types. Businesses can be more responsive and agile as they are not locked into one solution provider. They can also increase their resiliency by running primary and backup workloads in different clouds, minimizing downtime percentages.
The 4C’s—Key Drivers Behind a Hybrid Cloud Strategy
When you move to a hybrid cloud architecture, you have to make decisions on service provider, cost, application hosting strategy, etc. Here are four factors to consider before making the switch:
Capability: Map your requirements to the cloud provider’s strengths. For example, if your main focus is storage, AWS could be your preferred option with its plethora of alternatives such as S3, RDS, and Redshift. For a hybrid model, Azure scores with its Azure Stack, which offers a combination of public cloud services and a local data centre setup.
Compatibility: Conduct a thorough assessment of whether the cloud platform supports your IT architecture and choose an appropriate service model as per requirement. For example, IaaS works best for migrating traditional workloads as-is. Different PaaS models offer different levels of simplicity versus levels of control. SaaS is all about configuration and use.
Also, consider placing your applications on the same cloud platforms as of your business partners. This could save considerable effort spent in resolving integration issues.
Compliance: Organizations need to comply with regulations based on their geographical location and industry. For example, if you conduct business with any organization from the European Union, you need to comply with GDPR. Similarly, you need to satisfy PCI-DSS for the financial industry and HIPAA for healthcare. The cloud platform needs to offer in-built support for such compliance needs.
Cost: Using multiple clouds gives enterprises increased negotiation power and ability to optimize costs. As cloud pricing is based on resource consumption, predict your usage trajectory and host your apps accordingly. You can also leverage cloud bursting i.e. run the workloads on a private cloud with limited capacity and then switch to public clouds when demand increases during peak seasons.
The 4C’s evaluation process should give you pointers on:
• The number of cloud provider(s) (example, OpenStack + AWS + Azure)
• Private and public cloud formula (example, 1 private + 2 public clouds)
• Service model (example, mapping of clouds to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS)
• Overall ecosystem (example, decide between using ELK stack as an AWS service or setting it up on virtual machines for more control)
The Future of Hybrid Clouds
For organizations who want to accelerate their transformation to the cloud, a hybrid cloud is one of the most viable and cost-effective options as it allows them to retain some parts in local data centres and move the rest to multiple public clouds. Newer trends such as edge computing and containerization are only strengthening the hybrid cloud strategy further.
To access best-of-the-breed solutions across multiple platforms, consider a hybrid cloud strategy rather than limiting your cloud portfolio to just one.
