Surveys consistently show that businesses are opting for hybrid cloud because they hope to spend less than they would spend for on premises equipment. Achieving those cost savings requires careful planning because there are unavoidable costs that come with hybrid cloud environments.
The Costs of Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud solutions that integrate on premises and cloud-based services incur a number of costs, including:
- Management. While the cloud part of a hybrid environment is largely (but not fully) managed by the cloud provider, the integration with on premises services—the part that makes it a hybrid cloud—is completely your responsibility. This requires oversight of multiple environments, each with different technologies and processes.
- Compliance. Oversight of multiple environments is also a challenge and additional expense for your compliance team.
- Data. Ensuring the public and private sides of the hybrid cloud share data effectively and synchronize their changes can be complex. Setting up the environment requires an initial data migration that can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive, depending on the volume of data transferred.
- Application. Many applications are poor fits for the service-oriented style of cloud. You may need to spend time refactoring applications to work in cloud. To support cloudbursting you may need to make changes that allow multiple copies of an application to run in multiple environments, adding complexity, time, and cost to the application cloud migration. Even when not using cloudbursting, when applications in the cloud need to communicate with local applications you may need to invest time to establish that communication.
- Infrastructure. With hybrid cloud, you’re maintaining two environments. You may have duplicate storage costs and license costs to run applications in two locations.
Controlling Hybrid Cloud Costs
There are steps you can take to keep your hybrid cloud costs under control:
- Release unneeded resources. The ease of acquiring resources in the public cloud means it’s easy to add resources as needed, but it’s also easy to forget to release those resources when they aren’t needed any longer. Virtual machines for development and test environments when the project is over, along with storage for obsolete data, are a common source of unnecessary expenses. Develop scripts and procedures for lifecycle management to ensure environments are shutdown when they aren’t in use.
- Have a strategy for cloudbursting. Since one of the main purposes of using hybrid cloud is to have capacity available to handle spikes in demand, it’s important to develop policies that determine when you need to invoke the use of cloud resources. Automate the procedures to minimize the manual effort and expense required to shift processing to the cloud.
- Revisit staffing needs. Because your public cloud provider handles many of the support tasks for the cloud infrastructure, you many not need as large an IT team to handle routine support.
- Leverage cloud compliance support. Reduce the challenges and costs of compliance by choosing a cloud environment certified to meet your compliance standards. Disaster Recovery as a Service can help minimize the complexity and cost of testing your disaster recovery plan.
Minimize Costs With Strategic Oversight
Ongoing oversight of your hybrid cloud through managed services offers 24×7 support and monitoring of your infrastructure, eliminating the need for your team to spend time optimizing your hybrid workloads. dcVAST offers managed services for AWS as well as Nutanix in your data center, bringing expertise to both halves of your hybrid cloud. Contact us to learn how managed services can help bring your hybrid cloud costs under control.
