As the digital landscape continues to evolve at almost mind-blowing pace, organisations are finding themselves navigating a labyrinth of complexities when it comes to their IT systems. Missteps almost inevitably lead to bill shock, bottlenecks, and security vulnerabilities. A balance is needed between on-premise and cloud-based solutions. Then, there is a lot to keep track of with multiple clouds makes it much harder to manage than a single environment.
As businesses transform, they encounter points of evolution and disruption that require careful navigation and adaptation. At each stage, cloud is the catalyst for innovation, efficiency, and competitive advantage. Tooling, scaling up, allocating resources for usage and spending, enforcing encryption standards, handling the array of different licenses, are just some of the many questions organisations face. The ultimate question is what your business wants to achieve, now and for the future. Having the right foundations in place is important for setting your organisation up for success.
Here are our five top picks to ensure your cloud environment strategy delivers more success and fewer headaches.
- Define your hybrid cloud strategy: Determine where your workloads and data should reside (on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud) based on requirements for security, compliance, performance, and cost. By carefully assessing the technical aims and scope of activities, you’ll be able to make informed decisions to optimise your cloud strategy and deliver workflows and applications better, faster, and more simply.
- Optimise performance: Assess your workloads to determine the most suitable environment for each. Performance-sensitive or latency-critical applications may be better suited for on-premises or private cloud infrastructure to minimise network latency. It is also helpful to situate data closer to the users or applications that need it. Technologies such as edge computing do this job by caching content close to end users. Also consider auto-scaling to better manage workload spikes and prevent overprovisioning.
- Rebalance consumption to minimise costs: Continuously monitor and analyse resource utilisation across your hybrid cloud environments. Identify mismatches between paid-for cloud capacity and actual consumption and right-size accordingly. Bear in mind that native tools provided by the main hyperscalers usually don’t extend to private clouds or on-premises resources. More helpful is a hybrid cloud management toolset built to encompass third-party offerings to track and analyse consumption and spending across all cloud environments. For even more tactical savings, consider elastic public cloud compute services, such as reserved or spot instances. This model lets you target savings and steer placement of specific workloads. However, they’re not recommended for workloads unable to withstand occasional periods when target capacity is not completely available.
- Establish a robust security posture: Implement a unified cloud-centric approach to address the shortcomings of traditional network security – without inhibiting the performance of your vastly expanded network. A blueprint may need to be considered, for providing security policies governing data protection and threat prevention across your organisation’s entire hybrid cloud estate.
- Monitor and automate: Create a management layer to unify the underlying components of your environments within a single management interface. This will simplify application deployment and configuration, reducing manual errors and increase operational efficiency. A goal of effective cloud management is to bring development and operations teams closer together to deliver better applications faster, using automated deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) to effectively codify repeatable elements of software development and deployment. A crucial part of this is leveraging the concept of containers – packaging applications and their dependencies, to ensure that cloud resources are utilised optimally.
Ensure your hybrid cloud delivers the best of both worlds. Learn how CCL manages seamless integration of on-premises and cloud environments for optimal resource allocation and cost-efficiency.
