The Ultimate Guide to Hybrid Cloud Management: Meaning, Benefits, and Challenges

Quick Summary: This ultimate Hybrid Cloud Management Guide covers all the aspects of hybrid cloud including its meaning, benefits, challenges, optimization tips, and more. Get an in-depth view into hybrid cloud management and how it can benefit your business.

Cloud computing is not just a trend, it is more of a necessity today for modern businesses. Organizations need fast and simplified scaling of their software products and services that requires an agile IT foundation. Cloud IT management offers a robust infrastructure for this.

The cloud offers a new-age IT ecosystem to businesses. It endows them with the required digital transformation to meet changing market dynamics. They choose cloud application development services to create scalable and flexible solutions.

While some enterprises have shifted their IT infrastructure to the cloud, some are still hesitant to fully move to the cloud. Why? Because there are many benefits with mainframes and on-premises environments including superior security.

Though the cloud offers many advantages such as speed, lower cost, and quick deployment, very few organizations are choosing entirely public cloud. As per our findings, 56% of large-scale businesses have adopted a hybrid cloud strategy. It shows that most businesses are adopting a rather hybrid approach than fully going into a cloud-first business.

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Therefore, many businesses are exploring other opportunities like hybrid cloud management that unifies the private cloud and public cloud with on-premises data centers.

Businesses can set up a private cloud to host their critical data and run their enterprise applications on the public cloud.

Let’s understand what hybrid cloud computing is and how businesses can benefit from it.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

The first question that comes to your mind is – what is hybrid cloud management or simply hybrid cloud?

While the term hybrid cloud seems a bit confusing, it’s not in its aspect. In simple terms, it means managing your IT infrastructure with a mixture of the private cloud and the public cloud. So, the managed hybrid cloud offers the best of both worlds with enhanced security and speed.

Check public vs private vs hybrid cloud for a better understanding of these different cloud environments.

For example, an organization may have data centers on-premises but can use public cloud management to access applications that require information from the data centers. This configuration will allow the organization to leverage automation and other features.

A hybrid cloud environment is beneficial in many ways for organizations as follows.

• Organizations can maintain their legacy applications and tools that are crucial for their operations.
• They need not invest in new resources because they can use the on-premises infrastructure that saves cost.
• It also ensures data security because the most sensitive data will be available on-premises.

A hybrid cloud system provides the opportunity to adopt a modern approach such as DevOps implementation services to manage their software products and services.

What Makes Hybrid Cloud Management So Important?

With the advancements in technology, businesses are getting new and better ways to operate and deliver value to customers. The time when customers were satisfied with only a website and email has gone. Today customers expect to interact with businesses via multiple channels.

Digital transformation is indispensable for businesses today. The integration of their traditional IT system with the cloud can trigger this transition. Choosing the cloud brings cost benefits, business efficiencies, and competitive gains.

Cloud integration with your IT infrastructure is also important to infuse automation to modernize it. Automation infused in IT by the cloud will speed up the delivery of IT resources according to business or user demands.

Hybrid cloud management enables businesses to create versatile setups instead of entirely relying on a single environment. So, their workloads can be migrated and managed between multiple environments that make the optimal use of resources.

Businesses need not rely solely on an on-premises system or public cloud management. They can diversify their resources with the hybrid cloud on premise infrastructure. Knowing how to use traditional systems with the cloud can help organizations improve their service delivery and efficiency.

Pro tip: now when it comes down to managing resources and assets in a hybrid cloud environment, another innovation that is quite similar to hybrid cloud management is cloud inventory management solutions. It pays close attention to managing and tracking the inventory of cloud resources, such as storage, network resources, and virtual machines.

Organizations can leverage cloud modernization services to optimize their existing applications to operate in the cloud. This will help them orchestrate between on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure.

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Essential Concepts for Hybrid Cloud Management

Things can go complex quickly with hybrid cloud computing when organizations try to find the best approaches to management, security, and governance. They find that no single approach or tool solves all problems. So, what should a business do for management if it has a hybrid cloud or more likely multi-cloud management solutions?

It is important to understand the essentials of hybrid cloud management for an answer to the question. You shouldn’t pick up the technology and tools for hybrid cloud management right away because it can be really confusing.

This is where businesses need proper IT consulting to understand their needs and choose the most suitable pieces of tech. For this, you need to understand the following concepts before moving to hybrid cloud management platform.

SLAs (Service Level Agreements)

Performance can be very critical with hybrid clouds. So, SLAs are crucial for management. Create data transfer channels, latencies, and private-public interfaces to meet the performance expectations of the users. Use an optimal combination of the public and private cloud to ensure maximum uptime.

Identify Workloads

Figure out the workloads that will be run within the hybrid cloud environment and how they will consume the public cloud and on-premises resources. Plan out applications and estimate the data requirements, networking, integrations, possible load, and other information besides their value to users. Using this information, businesses can choose the right combination of tools and processes to manage their resources.

Administration and Security

When organizations are adopting DevSecOps and DevOps services, security should be the primary factor to consider when planning for hybrid cloud management. Start by identifying the security requirements of your on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Tools like IAM (Identity and Access Management) are helpful to create uniform security interfaces across multiple environments.

Consolidated View

Switching between multiple interfaces to manage various environments can be messy and hectic. It is best to use a technology or tool that can collect data from cloud and on-premises environments and display it on a single interface. So, using a tool or technology that offers a single pane of glass monitoring is advisable. A single system for metrics and tracking will simplify management.

What Facilities Do Hybrid Cloud Solutions Offer?

This is an era of clouds, and organizations need to understand how to streamline their business with the cloud to take maximum benefits. Thus, it is crucial to understand the facilities that the hybrid cloud management platforms will provide. Let’s overview the various capabilities that the hybrid cloud holds.

• APIs and Integrations: It facilitates the integration of the hybrid cloud with existing on-premises and cloud-based tools and systems.
• Seamless Transfer of Workload: Quick and automated relocation of workloads from private to public cloud and vice versa.
• Self-Service: It allows users to load, consume, and end workloads without understanding the underlying infrastructure.
• Cost Management: It lets you choose a good combination of cloud services to minimize cost and maximize ROI.
• Single Point View: Hybrid cloud makes it possible to show applications and services on a single dashboard that are running on multiple cloud environments.

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Management

The most significant benefit of a hybrid cloud is flexibility. So, organizations have the choice to either use public cloud or private cloud for workloads. They can also distribute the workloads between these two environments for maximum gain.

Let’s check all the benefits of investing in a hybrid cloud.

• Compared to on-premises infrastructure, cloud offers quick access to real-time data, and that too at a lower cost. Therefore, cloud adoption is expanding, and businesses are choosing services like PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Thus, swift data access is one of the key advantages of the cloud attracting more businesses.

• Hybrid cloud management offers a balance between security and scalability. Consequently, organizations can maintain a high level of security and leverage rapid scalability with a hybrid cloud.

• Minimal downtime is another advantage of the hybrid cloud because organizations can move a workload from a public cloud to a private cloud and vice versa.

• A business continues to work even in case of a failure or disaster without the risk of overloading the private servers.

• It is possible to implement strong security features like encryption, user access control, and more because of a centralized management system with a hybrid cloud.

Challenges to Hybrid Cloud Environment

While there are lots of benefits of hybrid cloud operations, there are also some limitations of hybrid clouds. Here are some challenges that hybrid cloud management could pose.

• Data Security and Compliance

Increasing concerns about data breaches and security threats are among the reasons why many organizations don’t seem excited about cloud services. Similarly, data between the public and private cloud management is less secure than the on-premises infrastructure. In addition, security compliances are another reason for their reservation towards the cloud.

• Compatibility Issues

When an organization is using a combination of public and private cloud or hybrid cloud solutions, compatibility issues of tools and applications arise. There are more chances of incompatibility of tools and processes occurring and may need to acquire new tools.

• Rules of Governance

When a hybrid model is in place, an organization will require a new governance policy to manage access and resources. The governance structure needs to determine rules when it comes to network access, resource pooling, on-demand services, and more.

• Skills Requirements

The system and network admins in an organization are familiar with the in-house data centers. But they need to match up to the requirements of the cloud and vice versa. In this situation, an organization can also look for other options like IT staff augmentation to get external expertise for their services.

• Scaling Complexity

Scaling is a benefit of a hybrid cloud. But the problem arises when an application requires additional capacity and is built behind an organization’s firewall. In that situation, re-engineering the data will be an option to use the cloud capacity and maintain security as well.

• Migration Issues

To migrate any application, an organization needs to make sure that it operates both in traditional and cloud environments.

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Hybrid Cloud Types and Architecture

There are several hybrid cloud computing patterns used today. The following are the key architectural types.

Software and Tools

Another approach to a hybrid cloud is the use of third-party software and tools. There is some hybrid cloud management software that organizations can use to centrally manage both public cloud and on-premises resources. A single interface is enough to operate virtual machines, storage, databases, etc.

Vendor-native Setup

An organization can start with a public cloud IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and plan for in-house resources accordingly to match that cloud environment. This way the organization can extend the cloud to their in-house data center ensuring full compatibility. It is a vendor-native hybrid cloud architecture. Companies offering such services are Dell, IBM, and Cisco.

PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)

It offers a complete environment in the cloud for developing and deploying applications. PaaS can be deployed on-premises, or it can be utilized in a hybrid environment. The user can decide where an application can run and be hosted. It can automatically configure resources across different environments making it suitable for a hybrid cloud.

Hybrid Cloud Management Tools and Platforms

Earlier IaaS vendors were reluctant to integrate their cloud platforms with their customers’ on-premises infrastructures. But now many companies are open to this new normal. So, there are some top platforms that offer cloud computing hybrid services.

AWS (Amazon Web Services)

One of the top tech giants Amazon offers AWS services. The company offers on-demand cloud computing and APIs to organizations and individuals. The AWS hybrid cloud services let organizations extend their infrastructure on-premises and at the edge. AWS also offers Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) that simplifies the multi-cloud infrastructure. Amazon offers several hybrid cloud solutions including AWS Outposts, AWS Wavelength, AWS EKS Anywhere, and more.

Azure

Another tech giant Microsoft offers its own cloud services known as Azure. The platform offers access and management of software, hardware, applications, and services via global data centers. It can be used to develop applications. Azure Stack is the primary hybrid cloud platform that Microsoft is offering.

When it comes to choosing a cloud platform, it’s tough to choose between AWS and Azure. Both have their pros and cons and provide numerous benefits.

Google Cloud Platform

Catching up to the competition, Google provides its own cloud services. The company uses the same infrastructure and resources for this platform as it is already using for its own products like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Drive. Google offers Anthos for hybrid cloud management. It is a container-based platform. The platform allows users to manage and deploy Kubernetes workloads in different environments.

Ways to Optimize Hybrid Cloud Environment

Here are some ways to optimize a hybrid cloud environment for your business.

• Implement Complete Orchestration: Managing many cloud platforms will result in slow operations and complex processes. Using a low-code API standardization helps in seamlessly integrating with cloud platforms. Integrate cloud services by using appropriate hybrid tools to easily pass data and dependencies across multiple platforms.

• Use a Good Governance Policy: Due to a mixture of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises environments, there is more complexity about where data is going and who is using it. A strong governance policy optimizes the workload and helps save costs.

• Choose Flexibility: Don’t assume that the environment you have created is the last one. Adopt a flexible approach through reconfiguration of the environment when your organizations evolve and grow.

As you struggle to manage different environments in hybrid cloud, the cost can rise if you don’t follow the right approach. In that case, you can follow the ways to cloud cost optimization and choose an optimal cloud configuration that saves a lot of bucks.

ConclusionBusinesses are gradually shifting to cloud services because of low cost and fast operations. However, organizations that are hesitant to choose public cloud services can pick hybrid cloud management. With a combination of cloud and on-premises resources, organizations can take advantage of both.The hybrid cloud enables businesses to create complex environments with a variety of cloud platforms. With the need for digital transformation, it is certain that businesses will choose the cloud, but due to rising security concerns, they are unlikely to fully shift to public clouds. Based on the current trend, it seems that most businesses will go hybrid when it comes to adopting the cloud.Radixweb, as a leading cloud-based application development company, meets the needs of various businesses seeking cloud services. We offer a wide range of cloud-based solutions. Contact us for all your cloud requirements to get professional services. We are a reliable tech partner for hybrid cloud deployment and can help you meet your requirements effectively!