With hybrid cloud adoption continuing to grow—MarketsandMarkets estimates an annual increase of 22.5 percent through 2021—companies need to carefully review the technology and to make smart design decisions for integrating public and private clouds.
The review needs to begin with an assessment of your current IT infrastructure, including hardware, applications, and network. It also requires defining a clear goal for your hybrid deployment. Once you understand what you have now and how it differs from where you want to be, you can begin asking specific questions to help you design a hybrid environment that meets your needs.
Ask questions that address all the elements—technical, managerial, and operational—that need to adapt to the hybrid design.
Technical
- Network: How will your on-premises equipment connect with the public cloud? How will your connection provide the necessary bandwidth, latency, and security? Will you need VPN or WAN connections?
- Compute: How many processors and how much memory will your cloud servers have? How will you be able to scale and expand capacity? How will you control the number of virtual machines?
- Storage: How will your storage grow? Will you be able to store and manage your backups across on-premises and cloud servers in an integrated fashion? How can you leverage different storage tiers and what optimizations are available?
Managerial
- Compliance: How will you meet regulatory and compliance needs in the cloud? What level of audit will you have access to?
- Financial: How will costs be managed, monitored, and charged back to business units? What controls are needed around self-service infrastructure requests?
- Configuration and change management: How will you track your environments? Will you need separate processes for the local and cloud elements?
- Incident management: How will you identify and respond to problems in cloud and on-premises servers? Are separate teams and procedures required?
Operational
- Virtual machines: How much control will you have over your virtual machines? Will they fail over automatically if the underlying hardware fails or will manual intervention be required?
- Security: How will access controls be managed? Can you use the same identity and access management tools across local and cloud devices? How will you achieve encryption of data at rest, in transit, and in use?
- Automation and orchestration: To what extent can routine procedures be automated? Will you allow and support self-service operations on virtual machines?
- Monitoring: How will you achieve an integrated view over your entire operation, both cloud and on-premises?
- Data protection: How will you manage backups of cloud and on-premises data and virtual machines?
Doing a thorough assessment and evaluating your answers to these questions is crucial to ensuring your hybrid cloud design delivers the benefits you’re hoping for. dcVAST’s professional services will help you understand your requirements and the changes needed to your on-premises environment to support hybrid cloud. We’re experienced with a wide range of cloud and infrastructure technologies that enable hybrid cloud success, such as NetApp and Nutanix. Contact us to learn more about the questions you need to ask before implementing your hybrid cloud.
