Taming the Cloud in a multi-hybrid environment!

Is hybrid/multi-cloud on your roadmap? Here’s how to tame the new beast to drive business efficiency!

Cloud adoption is fairly established across the enterprises, and yet industries are struggling to crack the cloud offerings for the best of their business. 84% organizations have multi-hybrid cloud on their roadmap but don’t have a path defined to achieve it.

Considering that there is an abundance of both providers and solutions, it’s often difficult for companies to decide which cloud resources are best fit for their need; which often results in over proportioned cloud resources and financial spills.

That’s why it is important to understand why cloud adjacency matters.

So, what is cloud adjacency?

Multi cloud & hybrid cloud are becoming the hot buzz of the cloud world. Let’s start with understanding the basics around what they are, so we know what is that we want.

Hybrid Cloud: Combine the flexibility of cloud while running your data center and you have a hybrid cloud in place.

Multi Cloud: It’s the use of multiple cloud services through different providers in a single heterogeneous architecture.

Hybrid cloud is reality | Multi cloud is an option

No organization can have all their workloads moved to cloud overnight, hence hybrid is the need even when you might have a full “Go to Cloud” strategy. The art lies in how to slice the workload in order to define the priority and order in which the workloads shall be moved to cloud (Refer to my previous blog on cloud strategy for understanding the nuggets on doing this). Multi cloud is the art of defining what moves where.

Why multi-cloud?

There could be several reasons for choosing multi cloud. Find out if you situation resonates with any of the below:

1. All eggs in one basket: One reason for going multi cloud could be to avoid being disaster prone. Enterprise often prefers splitting the workloads through load balancing or DR setup with different cloud providers
2. Bank vault design: Public cloud is often considered to be low security (though I personally see it often better secured than on premise). To overcome this, companies often prefer a mix of private & public clouds where they handle the security focused workloads in a private cloud environment and the business regular stuffs in a public environment.
3. Speed: With lots of organizations going with online business / ecommerce model, they prefer to have low latency. Hence choosing a datacenter (region) of a cloud provider closest to the end users helps maintain the low latency.
4. Avoiding lock In: Multi cloud empowers organizations to choose from innumerous services among providers, thus giving them autonomy to address their needs for performance, security, and ROI.

How to implement hybrid multi-cloud?

The rule of one size doesn’t fit all is what truly applies when defining multi cloud adoption. There could be several approaches to take the path. However, organizations would stand in good stead if they considered the underlying basis for taking the path, which is often driven by:

1. Application workload: The technology mix of your workload and the type (legacy or modern) plays a vital role in selecting among the cloud options. An assessment of your application portfolio could be a good place to start with. (eAPM)
2. Data privacy: Your data privacy framework is another pivotal reason of adoption of cloud choices on the basis of confidential vs open segregations. A good insight of the security and compliance requirements across organization and application workloads shall help in selecting right cloud services (our security framework)
3. Product type: Last but not the least factor affecting the cloud choice is type of product (compute vs data analytics vs collaboration). The understanding of the business product points out towards the corresponding match in cloud services offerings

It is imperative to say that multi-cloud is not a black or white choice.

Challenges in adopting multi-cloud journey

While we have understood the benefits and how to implement multi-cloud, it shall be of interest to also take a peek into the darker side of coin.

1. Security: The foundational assumptions of security shifts from being IP based to identity based access to resources. This is highly disruptive with respect to traditional security models
2. Applications: Applications are decoupled & dynamically provisioned through schedulers and APIs in multiple ways: VMs & containers.
3. Provisioning: Infrastructure layer transitions to service as a code where organizations can manage scalability of demand
4. Data: Data centric solutions can incur high cost & complexities in design architecture compared to a single cloud solution
5. Networks: Transitioning of services and applications to use dynamic registry for discovery, segmentation and composition can attract high complexities
6. Governance: The ability to maintain the objectives of cloud adoption like risk tolerance, strategic direction, monitoring resources and course correction.

Your technology leadership can be defined through the journey: right from the vision to adopt cloud and leverage it as a business enhancer to driving innovation, maximizing the ROI, and making your operations more pragmatic.

A good cloud adoption should be focused on the business goals while leveraging other important areas like design architecture, automation, and integration levers to bring in optimization at various levels.

We can help you tame the beast!

Considering that cloud is, today, the foundation for agility and helps accelerate the pace of innovations. Which, in turn, ensures the opening of new avenues that can optimize organizational value chain and generate profit and growth. It is imperative therefore, to carefully craft a robust cloud adoption plan so as to achieve the business goals.

We, at Capgemini, understand the needs and challenges you face during your Cloud Journey. Our deep expertise and experience in cloud is designed to fit all your needs and helps you take this leap of faith with us.

Are you looking for assistance to enable your multi-cloud journey? Get in touch with me and we can take the discussion forward.

Published by: Vikas Kumar
Regional Head – Cloud Practice, Sogeti Sweden
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Cloud strategist & Advisor, Vikas helps clients in their cloud adoption journey. He is a multi cloud professional, certified in (AWS, Azure, & Google) along with PSM, PMP, ITIL & Six Sigma certification with over 19 plus years of Information Technology experience which encompasses around Cloud Computing, Agile methodology, Service Delivery Management, IT Budgeting, IT Strategy Planning, Project Management, Strategic Planning, Business Development, Client Relationship Management, and systems integration along with remote infrastructure management.