Companies can have different reasons for choosing the hybrid cloud model. They may want the convenience of a cloud-based DR environment, or capacity on demand to support cloud bursting when processing loads peak. They may hope to gain flexibility in managing their IT resources or emphasize cost reductions by offloading many support activities.
Whatever the goals for transitioning to the hybrid cloud, companies need to plan and execute their migration carefully, always looking to the future.
Choose an Architecture to Support Future Workloads
Much of the success of a hybrid cloud transition will depend on the company’s prep work. This starts by understanding your reasons for migrating to the cloud; what are the use cases and applications the cloud architecture needs to support? When the use cases are understood, you can review the cloud service providers’ offerings and select a vendor who offers services that minimize the integration work you’ll need to perform.
Along with evaluating the cloud vendors’ technical capabilities, you need to evaluate your own internal infrastructure. Your network capacity, storage needs, and application management tools need to support the ability to move workloads and data between cloud and your premises. This capacity evaluation should plan for supporting future workloads as well as meeting your current needs.
Prepare Your Staff for Future Responsibilities
Your technical staff is as crucial to your cloud success as your technology. Their responsibilities and workload will change depending on how you use the cloud. If your disaster recovery function or storage moves to the cloud, the staff who handled those responsibilities will have their time freed up to take on new work. You should expect to have to provide specific training for staff to take on new responsibilities as well as general training on your new cloud architecture.
Your business staff also needs training to understand the new capabilities your hybrid cloud offers. If their business has been constrained because IT couldn’t respond quickly to business needs, make them aware of how the hybrid cloud can unleash their vision with its capacity to quickly respond to new demands. Both business and IT together need to develop an understanding of which workloads are appropriate for the cloud based on business, technical, and security criteria.
Be Prepared to Make Future Decisions
A hybrid cloud transition is never really complete. Every future application deployment requires making a deliberate decision regarding where the application’s compute and storage resources will be situated. The IT team will need to evaluate each application to decide how to best utilize resources and meet the application and business needs. IT teams that seize this opportunity to partner with the business will add to their value and find that the hybrid cloud makes IT more important to business success than ever.
Partners for Hybrid Cloud Success
dcVAST can be your partner for hybrid cloud success. With our expertise in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Nutanix, and other hybrid cloud technologies, we can help you evaluate hybrid cloud solutions, execute your migration, and support your ongoing cloud usage. Contact us to learn how your business can look to the future with hybrid cloud.
