Making the Most of Your Hybrid Infrastructure with a Cloud Management Platform

Cloud has endured high and low points in its relatively short lifecycle. Earlier this decade, it faced misgivings if not outright opposition from many major enterprises that refused to believe a cloud platform could ever replace an on-premises infrastructure. This was followed by a period of euphoria, when companies couldn’t wait to move their data to the public cloud. The current environment is more balanced, with the majority of enterprises believing a hybrid approach is the way forward. 

Forrester: 10 Things You Need to Know about Hybrid Cloud

But with multiple vendors selling cloud-based products and services that cater to specific requirements, a challenge with hybrid cloud is that it falls to businesses and/or their managed service providers to create and deploy a cohesive cloud management system that spans the hybrid cloud environment and provides a bridge between the private and public cloud infrastructures.

Managing the Intersection of Private-Public Cloud 
This is critical for the following reasons:

• Security and compliance. Unlike on-premise or private cloud, enterprise data in a hybrid cloud environment doesn’t necessarily reside in a single place. This makes a security and/or compliance breach a very real threat. To reduce risk, businesses need to know where their data physically resides and ensure the applications leveraging it are running in approved environments. With an effective cloud management system, this can be accomplished without reviewing each instance, and insights can be provided from across the multiple cloud landing zones.
• Cloud economics. Because vendor charges are usually inversely proportional to workload volume, costs can actually increase with a hybrid cloud approach, with workloads spread across multiple vendors and platforms. The best way to prevent this is to combine human supervision with cloud management tools that can analyze and track cloud spend and support data-driven, smart decisions.
• Management complexity. Reliance on multiple cloud vendors and different platforms and services inevitably makes management more complex. To take a very simple example, access management can become quite complex if there are multiple vendor deployments, each with its unique set of rules. By partnering with a managed service provider, businesses can create a custom hybrid cloud management platform that takes these variables into account.
• Shadow IT. While a hybrid cloud environment provides an unprecedented level of flexibility in terms of the vendor, service, product or platform used to resolve business problems, it can also lead to shadow IT, wherein different functions or processes rely upon entirely different tools, bypassing in-house IT entirely. Unchecked, this can result in cost, compliance and security concerns.

A competent managed service provider can address this issue by taking all the process heads on-board, and creating a management strategy that includes proactive monitoring to prevent security or compliance lapses.

Taking Hybrid Cloud Management to the Next Level
Using our Integrated Cloud Management Platform, we helped a leading pharmaceutical company develop a self-service portal that enables resource provisioning in an Amazon Web Services cloud for various business units, covering over 750 apps and 25,000 virtual machines. We worked with the company to automate its security compliance implementation and leverage bots to perform log scanning for each account.

Through holistic end-to-end automation, the company developed strong cloud operations capabilities and reduced time to market, relying on bots and open source-based solutions to drive its business.

An efficient cloud management and monitoring platform is a critical element for any business developing a hybrid cloud roadmap and seeking to realize the full benefits of cloud. With a future-ready, secured and integrated platform that orchestrates applications and workloads across multiple cloud landing zones, businesses can prepare themselves for what it takes to compete in the digital future.

To learn more, visit our hybrid cloud section.