Striking the Right Balance of Environments for a Hybrid Cloud
Operational performance, security, economics and flexibility all have a great impact on an organization’s cloud strategy. Striking the right balance among public cloud services, private cloud, and the data center can come down to a mix of these factors or can be dominated by just one. Finding the right mixture of environments is critical for your organization to achieve the best value when creating a hybrid cloud strategy. Consider the following:
Public clouds offer amazing capabilities for scalability; however, once you have ongoing knowledge of usage patterns, you may want the greater management and control of a private cloud.
You may want to perform development and testing on one public cloud, because they have great support services, but you may then want to deploy it on a less expensive public cloud when it becomes operational.
Public clouds give customers a great deal of control and flexibility over their costs. Although as time goes on, the costs of renting compute resources add up and it may become more economical to build your own infrastructure and create a private cloud.
Your organization may become too reliant on just a few vendors and decide to build its own cloud to become more self-sufficient. As your private cloud matures, you may even begin having partners use it as a platform. In this case, your company goes from a cloud customer to a provider.
IT — and especially cloud computing — is a dynamic environment that is constantly changing and innovating and will continue to remain so. Vendors are often increasing their offerings and competing with each other for price. It’s therefore important that your organization not just adopt a strategy and stick with it; instead you must regularly revisit your approach and consider how the changing landscape affects your economic model.
Your organization’s mixture of different cloud services and use of its data center will change. It’s important to have a well thought-out hybrid cloud strategy, but you need to be nimble and willing to change that strategy to better the business.