How to develop a winning hybrid cloud strategy
Migration of workloads to the cloud was one of the digital trends rapidly escalated by pandemic lockdowns. We explain what makes a hybrid cloud strategy fly.
By Reuters Plus
Public cloud computing has transformed the way organisations purchase and use technology, with demand for cloud computing services accelerating in the past year, largely because of enforced home working.
Global enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing is forecast to keep growing by 18.4 per cent in 2021 to reach USD 304.9 billion1, according to Gartner. ‘On-premise’ and private cloud infrastructure also remain crucial to long-term company strategy as organisations look to hybrid cloud solutions.
“Hybrid cloud gives an organisation the flexibility to place workloads where they need to be,” says Jason Price, Vice President, Technology for IBM Australia. “In an ideal world everything would be in the cloud, but the reality is that 85 per cent of workloads are still run through on-premise infrastructure.”
Hybrid cloud approaches optimise the delivery of workloads and allow organisations to curate their IT infrastructure in a flexible way to best serve their specific operational needs.
Greater agility, cost savings, and scalability are the three major reasons a growing number of organisations are shifting workloads into the cloud, notes Matt Taylor, Head of Partner Success Solutions Architecture in Asia-Pacific and Japan, at the world’s largest cloud platform provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). On-premise, however, remains an important part of the picture.
A subset of applications must remain on-premise, typically due to low-latency (the delay between a client request and a cloud service provider's response), local data processing, high data transfer costs, or data residency requirements, Taylor explains. “This leads many organisations to seek hybrid cloud architectures to integrate their on-premise and cloud operations to support a wide range of use cases, like disaster recovery to the cloud, data centre extension, and cloud bursting (which allows for private clouds to ‘burst’ into public clouds at times of excess demand without disrupting services).”
In a survey of more than 350 IT professionals for global data centre operator Equinix, 93 per cent of respondents said their organisations were committed to, or interested in, a hybrid cloud strategy, while a similar proportion (89 per cent) said their organisations expect to maintain a meaningful on-premises footprint in the next three years.2
As the public cloud market has matured, the leading native public cloud providers AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, which together account for more than two-thirds of the public cloud market3, have evolved their offerings to facilitate the operation of workloads across hybrid settings.
“Cloud computing is now part and parcel of the majority of IT strategies, but the focus has moved from a ‘cloud first’ approach, where organisations planned to ‘lift and shift’ everything to the cloud, to a more considered approach for workloads,” says Elliot Jurd, Asia Pacific General Manager for Cloud at specialist cloud services provider Nexon.
He cites a recent study conducted in Australia and New Zealand by Tech Research Asia, which showed that more than 44 per cent of organisations have moved workloads back from public cloud to private cloud or on premises environments.
The benefits of flexibility
Successful hybrid cloud models harness the innovation of cloud platforms and maintain the cost benefits and low latency of on-premise solutions.
They provide flexibility for organisations seeking to scale up capacity and handle temporary spikes in demand and eliminate the need to invest in infrastructure and equipment that is only required for a short period of time.
Adoption rates have soared in the pandemic period, with organisations layering cloud-powered technology on top of on-premise infrastructure to rapidly increase the provision of key services.
AWS, for example, worked with French public bank Bpifrance and cloud technology group Padok to support the distribution of state guaranteed loans for small businesses in France through the pandemic period. Within five days Bpifrance set up an online platform for SMEs to apply for the loans and scaled-up its ability to process credit requests.
Pre-pandemic Bpifrance was processing 12,000 credit requests annually, but with its cloud-powered platform in place, it worked through 75,000 requests within three weeks, reaching a daily peak of 8,000 loan applications.4
In the education space, AWS partnered with the Universidad de Los Lagos to expand the Chilean university’s learning management system and support 11,000 students remotely by moving workloads to a cloud platform.5
Managing complexity
Implementing a hybrid cloud model to realise such benefits, however, can be complex. Organisations have to manage multiple environments and ensure data and application interoperability between workloads in the cloud and on-premise.
In the study for Equinix, 47 per cent of respondents said managing resources spanning on-premise and cloud environments was significantly or more difficult when compared to other cloud computing tasks.6
Multiple environments require different tooling and skill sets, making it harder to keep track of costs and maintain uniform processes and standards. Data and application migration between on-premise and public cloud environments adds further complexity.
On top of potential downtime as assets are migrated, the process is resource intensive as some applications need to be reconfigured ahead of the shift.
Cyber security risks also need to be carefully considered, says Ross MacKenzie, Head of Security Control Assessment in the security group at Westpac.
Hybrid clouds have unique security demands. Cyber security controls in a hybrid cloud setting must be able to both assess and respond to issues across multiple environments, and to constantly track the security of data and services across platforms.
Understanding where responsibilities lie across different platforms is especially important. “Cloud providers are responsible for certain aspects of security, but organisations as cloud customers also have security responsibilities in the cloud, and cloud customers need to be clear on where the provider’s responsibilities start and end,” MacKenzie says.
“Security breaches in the cloud can occur as they do elsewhere, and the security operations of the cloud customer are key in reducing this risk.”
The complexities of managing a hybrid cloud have become particularly acute as cloud platform providers have become more specialised.
Cloud businesses have evolved from supplying vanilla “infrastructure-as-a-service” offers to the provision of specialised services, says Daniel Ong, APAC Solutions Architect for data centre operator Digital Realty.
“Some providers will specialise in data analytics and artificial intelligence. Others will focus on providing database functionality, collaboration tools or edge computing, where applications have to be located close to equipment or the source of data,” Ong says. “Every enterprise needs computing power and storage, but if that is all you are offering there is a recognition in the industry that you are in a race to the bottom.
“Specialisation is driving earnings for cloud platform providers. They want to work in data analytics, build databases and provide edge computing because these are the higher value areas that also make their products more ‘sticky’ with customers.”
Ideally, there should be no limit on the number of cloud platforms users can run alongside on-premise infrastructure. However, when using cloud services that deliver more than just base computing and storage it becomes increasingly difficult to connect and integrate applications between platforms
According to a Bain & Company COVID-19 IT Buyer survey more than 70 per cent of companies still only using one provider for their computing infrastructure.7
“One of the challenges is that most individuals and organisations have preferences with products or clouds. With the market fragmentation that software-as-a-service has created, and the pace of product development in software these days, it makes the job of selecting the right partners exceedingly difficult for the Chief Information Officer (CIO),” Nexon’s Jurd says, adding: “Organisations should be looking to partner with solution providers that are aligned to their journey and invested in the outcome.”
Finding solutions
Native cloud and hybrid cloud providers are alive to headwinds facing customers as they strive towards the seamless integration of IT infrastructure across multiple platforms.
IBM, for example, following its USD 34 billion acquisition of software company Red Hat in 20188, has strengthened its “containerisation” capabilities, which allow for workloads to be shifted between any public or private cloud platform without having to reconfigure data and applications.
“Containerisation will be very important because it facilitates true hybrid cloud capability,” IBM’s Price says. “It allows workloads to be scaled and moved from one environment to another and gives clients genuine flexibility,”.
Price explains how the Australian Football League (AFL), has used containerisation to control IT costs and adapt to fluctuations in demand.
“Around Cup Final times the AFL experiences huge spikes in traffic on its website. By using containerisation it can locate its assets in a high-performance but more expensive environment during busy times of the season, then lift these workloads and drop them into lower cost environment through the off-season,” Price says. IBM has adapted its on-premise and private cloud pricing plans to replicate the “pay for what you use” pricing model that public cloud providers use.
Cloud native providers are also adapting. AWS, for example, has developed its Outposts product that allows customers to run AWS infrastructure on premises. Customers who need to run certain workloads on-premise for regulatory or security reasons can do so with the same technology and equipment they use for public cloud applications, facilitating interconnectivity between cloud and on-premise infrastructure.
Public cloud services are expected to become increasingly important over the coming years. The Equinix commissioned research predicts a 45 per cent increase in the number of organisations running more than 30 per cent of production applications on public cloud infrastructure.
The most successful users will securely integrate public and on-premise infrastructure in a way that gives them flexibility and captures the benefits of both worlds
“Organisations need to realise that they don’t have to scrap all of their existing infrastructure investments in order to take advantage of the cloud,” Taylor says. “A hybrid approach gives their teams time to learn, ride out existing investments and depreciation schedules, and still benefit from the elasticity, agility, security, and cost characteristics of the cloud.”
2 https://www.equinix.co.uk/resources/analyst-reports/esg-hybrid-cloud-trends-e-book
3 https://kinsta.com/blog/cloud-market-share/
4 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/cloud-technology-is-transforming-public-services-this-is-how/
5 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/cloud-technology-is-transforming-public-services-this-is-how/
6 https://www.equinix.co.uk/resources/analyst-reports/esg-hybrid-cloud-trends-e-book. See page 17 of downloadable ebook.
7 https://www.bain.com/insights/hybrid-cloud-future-tech-report-2020/. See Figure.1.
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