How to Overcome the Challenges of Hybrid Cloud Adoption

Hybrid Cloud offers many amazing features to enterprises. Thus, many companies are shifting to a hybrid cloud platform. However, there are many challenges that you need to overcome. Most IT admins don’t want to handle their applications to other third-parties. Thus, the public cloud is not a good option for most companies. A hybrid cloud will help you in building a flexible environment. Also, it is the most used deployment model. There are many benefits to both private and public clouds. A hybrid cloud will help you in combining these benefits. In this article, we are going to share some tips that will help you in overcoming the challenges of hybrid cloud adoption.

1. Security Compliances

This is the biggest challenge that you are going to face. You need to meet various security compliances and regulations. These compliances will depend on your industry. If you are working in the healthcare sector, then you need to follow HIPAA compliance. Similarly, if you are working in the financial sector, then you need to follow the PCI compliance. These compliances will vary according to your industry. It can be very difficult to follow these compliances when you are running multiple cloud servers.

The lack of redundancy is the most common security challenge that you are going to face. This can have a lot of effect on your cloud deployment. If there is a lack of redundancy, then your backup copies will be not present in your IT infrastructure.

Backups are very important for every cloud infrastructure. It is important to achieve redundancy. This will help you in reducing the possibility of data loss. Also, this will ensure that your data is always available. If one of your servers is down, then it will automatically switch to another cloud server. This will help you in minimizing the downtime.

You also need to ensure that you are following all the industry standards. Your cloud provider must follow all the relevant standards. Also, your on-premise servers must follow all the relevant compliances. For example, if you are working in the healthcare industry, then you need to prove that your infrastructure is compliant with HIPAA.

Data breaches are another big concern for companies. Everyone knows about the Equifax data breach. Hackers got access to more than 143 million accounts in a single data breach. Thus, it is important to protect your data from attackers.

It is also difficult to establish an access management policy. If you are working with a third-party provider, then you need to establish new access rules. You need to develop a clear process. This will ensure that only authorized people can access your data.

2. SLAs

You should read the SLA of your cloud provider. This SLA will define your important business processes. Thus, you need to ensure that your cloud provider knows about your business needs.

Your cloud provider must provide good SLA to you. Most companies already have standards for their IT infrastructure. You should ask your cloud provider to follow the same standards.

It is also important to test this. You should increase the workload on your on-premise servers. If you can still access your sensitive data, then you don’t need to worry about downtime.

3. Data Integration

You should store all your sensitive data in the on-premise infrastructure. Cloud is perfect for other workloads and data. More than 1/3rd cloud users have experienced downtime or errors. This can affect your revenue.

If you are using a hybrid cloud, then you also need to deal with the data integration process. You need to exchange accurate data between cloud and on-premise servers. This can be a very complex process. Thus, it can increase the chances of error during the integration process.

You need to calculate the data that you can lose due to downtime. This should be specified in your Service Level Agreement. Also, you should evaluate other DR solutions of your cloud provider. You should try to eliminate the downtime. This will help you in focusing on other things. Thus, you should start thinking about cloud DR options. These options will help you in minimizing the probability of downtime.

4. Skill Gaps

This is another common challenge that most companies ignore. Your IT staff should know about cloud technology. The hybrid cloud storage is different from on-premise storage.

Most IT admins rely on the provider for handling their applications. Your IT staff should have knowledge of the application architecture design. Also, they should know about all the processes. They should know about the integration development and application development. These things will help them in managing the cloud environment.

You should work with the cloud provider for filling the skill gap. They already know everything about the cloud capabilities. You should train your staff in the new cloud computing technology. Also, they should work on developing good cloud management strategies. If your employees already know about cloud technology, then they should lead the team. It is always a good idea to hire someone who knows everything about the cloud environment. They will boost the efficiency of your daily operations.

5. Use cases of cloud architecture

It is important to learn from other’s mistakes. This will help you in avoiding many errors. The TCO of the cloud-based environment is around 40%. There are many methods to save money. You can save more than 40% of your money by using the cloud platform.

According to a report by Bain Brief, more than 21% of companies want to shift their infrastructure to the cloud. However, many companies still prefer a private cloud network. This will help them in meeting various standards and regulations. The private cloud adoption is slowly going down with time. More companies are switching to hybrid cloud architecture. Thus, it is the best time to switch to the hybrid cloud.

6. Network elements

The network is the most important thing in any cloud environment. Most application developers think that all the components are close to each other.

However, this is not true in a hybrid cloud environment. Every component is separated virtually and physically. You should do the correct mapping of your network topology. This will help you in overcoming this problem.

Most data centers already have a solution to this problem. Thus, they are deploying hybrid cloud solutions for responding to this challenge. It is important to ensure that your applications are running smoothly. You can achieve this by hosting applications in a single place.

This process will depend on the size of your applications. You might need to stack all the applications in one environment. Thus, you should find a solution according to your infrastructure.

7. Running an application

You are not going to migrate only a single server to the cloud. Companies are moving their whole application stack. There are many tools that will help you in supporting the environment complexity. However, these tools mostly focus on the underlying infrastructure. Most companies think that resource provisioning is the only thing that they need to do. However, it is only an element of running an entire application.

There are many more things that you need to take care of you. For example, containers will help you in distributing the workload. You need to ensure that your applications can run in every environment. Your layer should also support monitoring and configuration management.

8. Finding the right cloud technology

If you are using a hybrid cloud, then you need to find a common ground between the public and private infrastructure. This will help you in enjoying the benefits of both infrastructures. You might use public cloud resources for the staging and testing process.

You should know how the environments are operating. Most companies look for the cheapest services. They want to provide a seamless experience to their users. However, they also want to save money at the same time.

Your employees should have the ability to work in both the cloud environment. They don’t need to worry about the cloud environment that they are using. You need to ensure that they are getting the same security, bandwidth, and speed in both environments.

9. Compatibility Challenges

This is another challenge that you will face while using the hybrid cloud. There are two different infrastructures that you will be using. Most companies will use their on-premise infrastructure for storing critical applications. They will use the public cloud platform for running other applications.

Your IT admins should already know about the on-premise infrastructure. However, they might not know anything about cloud infrastructure. Thus, you might need to train them about the new technology. Some cloud providers will offer tools to your IT admin. Thus, they can use the same tools for managing both the infrastructure.

10. Governance in a hybrid cloud environment

It can be difficult to govern your hybrid cloud. Thus, you must create a list of best practices. This list will help you in managing your hybrid cloud. You need to think about resource pooling, network resources, and elasticity.

It is important to create practices that can be automated. Automation is the future of our world. Thus, it is important to give importance to AI. You should also tell about this to your employees and users. If you are changing something in your network, then you should inform users. This will ensure that your users know about all the changes. Your users will also help you in finding errors. They can directly report errors to the network admin.

11. Control and Visibility

Companies are working with different cloud providers. They are using a mix of public clouds like Google, AWS, and Azure. Some companies are mixing this with private cloud providers like Openstack. The complexity of the network is growing due to this. Thus, it is very difficult to control all these distributed systems. It is becoming difficult to see your entire IT environment.

This can compromise the security of your cloud environment. If you don’t have control over your infrastructure, then it will be very difficult to implement self-service systems. You won’t know who is changing your configuration settings. Thus, it will be very difficult to have a collaborative environment. Agile development depends mainly on collaboration.

You can solve this by trying to automate everything. It is important to implement your security and infrastructure as code. This will help you in removing the manual work. If you can use automation, then you should eliminate the manual process. Automation will also increase the efficiency of your network. Your employees can easily share and verify code. This will also simplify the security audit procedure.

You should use tools for managing your environment from a centralized location. This will increase the visibility of your infrastructure. These tools are very important for your infrastructure. It will be very difficult to change your infrastructure without these tools. You should also ensure that these tools are using open standards. This will help you in finding people that already know about these tools. Thus, they can quickly help you in managing your environment.

12. Security

The biggest issue with cloud infrastructure is still security. You need to ensure that you are working with a trustworthy cloud provider. It can be difficult to secure your hybrid environment. You need to have good security policies. These policies will help you in securing your environment. There should be trust between your staff and the provider. You should also ensure that the ISO accreditation of your provider is good. They should follow all the standard security regulations. This will ensure that your data in the public cloud is secured.

Conclusion

The hybrid cloud is becoming more popular with time. Most companies are shifting to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. However, there are many challenges that you need to deal with. You should discuss your SLA, performance, and security needs with your provider. These issues can grow into serious challenges in the future. You should know everything about your cloud infrastructure. This will help you in boosting the efficiency of your environment. If you need more information regarding the hybrid cloud environment, then you can contact Bleuwire.

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