Planning to use hybrid cloud? Get your data center ready by preparing for these 5 challenges.
1. Network
The network is a challenge for any cloud deployment, with your wide area network (WAN) connections critical for connecting to your cloud provider. Using public internet for this connection can cause problems in two ways:
- increased demand for WAN bandwidth. Hybrid cloud means that some traffic which used to be internal may now need to exit the data center and head to the cloud. That means more load on your WAN connections.
- inconsistent performance. Using public internet connections means competing with the entire public for bandwidth. This can cause delays and transmission failures.
Address these problems by investing in high-speed links and a direct connection to your cloud vendor.
2. Security
Ensuring the security of your data is another major challenge in preparing for hybrid cloud. Although you will have systems in two places, you should aim for a single security strategy that crosses both public and private platforms. This integration is simpler if your cloud vendor uses the same identity management and authentication tools that you use internally. Using a single tool makes it possible to define rules once and synchronize them in with the other system. If you have multiple tools, security controls will need to be maintained separately in both clouds.
3. Communication
Hybrid cloud doesn’t work if the clouds can communicate. One of the most challenging issues is figuring out how to get data across the cloud boundaries. Your cloud provider and each of its services may have its own requirements for data transfer, while you need to also ensure security and adherence to regulations. APIs and file exchange methods need to be understood and tested, and you need automation to ensure that batches for daily and end of month processes run smoothly. When you develop and expose your own APIs, you need to ensure that they can be accessed only by authorized applications and authorized users, and that they don’t share more data than required for the function. Data transfers also incur costs, so money matters may be a consideration when designing your cloud communication process.
4. Management
Once you’ve set up the hybrid cloud, managing its diverse resources is necessary to ensure effective use. While public cloud can scale on demand, you need a process for estimating capacity requirements in your private cloud and spare capacity on site to allow private cloud to smoothly grow. You will likely need catalogs with templates and automated procedures to ensure adding capacity in either public or private cloud conforms to your standards.
5. Backup and disaster recovery
Know how you will backup your public and private clouds and how you will function in case of a disaster. Know whether you will backup your cloud VMs to local storage. If your private cloud fails over to your secondary site, do you have the communication links and configurations to enable it to communicate with the public site?
Make sure you’re ready for hybrid cloud with services from dcVAST. Our professional services assess your requirements, then implement a solution customized to meet your needs. Contact us to talk about how you can overcome these challenges and get the benefits of hybrid cloud.
