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How to Develop a Hybrid Cloud Migration Strategy
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Rafi Adinandra
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2022-01-16

For most businesses with hundreds of applications, developing a hybrid cloud migration strategy can be the difference between few and limitless business options. A hybrid cloud strategy spreads applications across a mix of public and private clouds to maximize their effectiveness in reaching business outcomes.

While hybrid cloud has been around for a while, it has only recently begun rapid adoption by businesses that see its great potential. We can see this in the global study of 7,200 C-suite executives across 28 industries and 47 countries where use of single or private cloud has dropped from 29% in 2019 to only 2% in 2021. This makes hybrid cloud the dominant IT architecture, according to the IBM and Oxford Economics Study.

Businesses are clearly seeing the many potential business benefits of a successful cloud strategy that emphasizes a hybrid cloud approach. It can deliver the best of all worlds when it comes to flexibility, scalability, cost savings, and security if done correctly. This can translate the following business benefits:

  • Lower infrastructure costs
  • Faster business operations
  • Reduced downtime
  • Improved remote workforce productivity
  • Tighter security for locally stored mission-critical data and workloads
  • Faster and easier data backups
  • Reduced response time
  • Improved scalability to meet fluctuating demand
  • easier workload migration
  • Increased cost-effectiveness (i.e., the ability to host workloads and applications in the right cloud).
  • Increased flexibility and agility to scale according to business and/or market needs

As with all things cloud, what may start out as simple can quickly become complex as your hybrid cloud strategy takes shape and changes. A hybrid cloud architecture of public/private cloud and on-prem can be a complex formula for enterprises to devise, but the key is in how you assess all workloads.

Determining what workloads will live where and how to accommodate them in the migration process (lift and shift, refactoring, etc.) requires a full assessment and mapping of all workloads, applications, and their dependencies. This will help determine application and workload placement within the hybrid architecture to maximize cost savings, accessibility, security, backup, and disaster recovery options.

Properly moving any application to the public cloud and ensuring it performs the same as it did on premises is never easy. It requires IT teams to follow an established set of best practices where the learning curve can be steep. IT teams can often benefit from an experienced cloud migration partner. If they’re cloud agnostic like Techolution, they can bring the expertise of all cloud providers to determine the best choice for each application’s needs. This ensures that we base all decisions on business goals and objectives.

Aligning Hybrid Cloud Goals with Business Goals and Objectives

To achieve hybrid cloud benefits for the business, you must start with defining needed business outcomes that benefit internal end user/operations and external customer experience and scalability. These things vary from business to business, so it’s imperative to have a detailed blueprint on how applications and workloads are affecting the business on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis.

By mapping the business’ long-term objectives to cloud functionalities, you can prioritize which applications you should move to the cloud first and what services you should move to the cloud. Assessing each application and mapping their dependencies is crucial to determining with applications are best suited for migration as part of a hybrid cloud model. By prioritizing what needs to go where and when, and the best time to migrate each application it keeps your strategy organized, on-time and cost effective.

Legacy applications can still be candidates for migration as much as new applications, but it all comes down to what parts of an application you will migrate and when. You must consider such factors as:

  • Each application’s mission critical ranking
  • Security and performance needs and objectives
  • What benefits we can derive from placing specific parts of the app on specific public, private, or local infrastructure
  • Clear understanding of regulatory compliance needs

Depending on the application and whether it is best served by an IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, approach, you will not migrate many applications, databases, and workloads to a single location. By understanding why it’s important to shift the right pieces of an application, you can increase the benefits gained from a long-term hybrid cloud strategy.

Shift the Right Pieces of an Application

Determining the right parts of an application to migrate for maximum benefit can be complex, but the right choice yields benefits like cloud bursting capabilities and cost savings among others. Hybrid cloud strategies require applications to operate smoothly across on-premises, private clouds, and public clouds, so assessing the applications’ traffic communications helps to determine how much data is being shared and if there is significant lag time that affects performance.

Applications are also workloads, storage, and databases, so we must carefully assess these to ensure that costs don’t get out of hand as the application grows. One way to avoid this is with the use of cloud storage tiers. Moving workloads to the cloud affects the network and may add a lag between the data center and the cloud that lowers application performance. Hybrid cloud strategies must consider network performance and make any adjustments to avoid application slowdowns.

Cost will always be a driver of how businesses design and use their hybrid cloud architecture. Most now understand that the public cloud is not a magic cost-savings bullet for everything as some workloads grow to a point that the billing cost is prohibitive in the public cloud. The ability to repatriate applications and workloads into an on-prem/ private cloud scenario when necessary is paramount.

Overall, third-party tools are for analyzing the existing environment and inform decisions about what is being moved, but they aren’t always intuitive and often have a significant learning curve. While there are a growing number of third-party tools for moving workloads into and out of the cloud, many still have limitations in terms of interoperability, integration, and simplicity.

There are now tools that make it easier to manage Hybrid Cloud architectures in ways that give businesses a single-pane-of-glass view to the entire pre- to post-migration window across the hybrid environment. While all major cloud providers offer advice, they cannot tell each business what, when, and how to move workloads in a way that is simple and intuitive. Your hybrid cloud environment will constantly change over time so it’s imperative to have metrics aligned with specific business outcomes to keep things on track.

Why Metrics will determine Hybrid Cloud Success

The success of your hybrid cloud migration strategy will be revealed in the metrics that track how performance aligns with your business objectives. Some aspects of a hybrid cloud strategy can be expensive, but can be offset by savings in help desk, end user productivity, and customer experiences that lead to market growth.

Comparing such disparate data points from different sources can be complex, but this is where you can find the opportunities for innovation, savings, resiliency, speed, and increased security. The most important lesson is that your successful hybrid cloud strategy requires input from across the business and outside partner expertise.

Involving Partner Expertise and End Users in Hybrid Cloud Strategy Development

Implementing a successful hybrid cloud strategy requires involving all aspects of the business beyond the IT department to help determine current application issues and what benefits the cloud can bring to end users. These employees, from HR to marketing to CFO and beyond, hold important knowledge that can guide the hybrid cloud strategy over time. Security will always be paramount in a hybrid cloud strategy. End users can provide insights to your security team during application assessment to understand each app’s security and regulatory needs and how that translates to the hybrid cloud.

End users and IT bring a broad spectrum of expertise in how apps work and how they should work within the business. The challenge for IT is that few internal IT teams have the deep expertise across all cloud providers to determine which is best for the hybrid strategy needs.

Cloud managed services bring specific expertise that many teams lack, so having some support from a skilled partner in these areas can be paramount to success. Having access to fractional expert personnel support at different stages of the hybrid cloud strategy execution can relieve the burden on internal IT teams. That same consultative support can:

  • Provide a consultative approach to developing an effective hybrid cloud strategy
  • Make needed application and workload assessments
  • Provide needed fractional personnel and experts
  • Help train internal IT teams on how to test, manage, monitor, and expand the hybrid strategy over time so that knowledge transfer benefits the in-house IT teams.

The Techolution team has partnered with startups to global enterprises to develop hybrid cloud migration strategies that deliver defined business results. If you want to learn more about how we develop a custom approach tailored to your specific business and needs, follow this link.

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