The hybrid cloud combines public and private cloud architectures with on-premises infrastructure, including IT resources that may already exist in the cloud. Many organizations adopt hybrid cloud management strategies to coordinate workloads across these different environments. This approach allows businesses to spread their workloads across multiple data centers and providers, which extends their capabilities while maintaining existing systems and hardware.
Cloud migration efforts often lead to hybrid cloud implementation, since organizations test workloads in phases. However, managing a hybrid cloud environment can present challenges, since data and services often span across several locations and platforms.
What Is Hybrid Cloud Management?
Hybrid cloud management often involves managing the diverse architectures and resources of a hybrid cloud from a single platform. In some cases, however, a company may run a multi-cloud system with several public or private cloud providers. The advantage of hybrid cloud management is that your data becomes more resilient through the coordinated orchestration of a complex environment. For example, if one of your environments were to go down or be attacked via ransomware, you’d have another environment or provider to restore to or from, giving you more flexibility and resiliency. By distributing resources across multiple clouds, companies can enhance their ability to withstand disruptions and outages. This also can help establish operational redundancy to ensure business continuity in the event of service disruption or downtime with a single provider.
Why is Hybrid Cloud Management Important?
Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments offer several potential benefits for small businesses. By hosting data and services in multiple locations, your infrastructure automatically becomes more resilient. If one location experiences a cyberattack, power outage, or severe damage due to weather, your applications will still remain affected since you can failover to other data centers.
Business continuity isn’t the only benefit that comes from distributing resources across multiple clouds. For example, if you have customers in several geographic locations, having multiple points of presence allows you to offer a higher level of service. This can be particularly beneficial if your service is one where low latency is important, since users can connect to the server that’s closest to their location. This means customers can benefit from a reduced ping time, and you can enjoy the benefits of load balancing across your servers.
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Management
Hybrid cloud configurations offer an easy and cost-effective way to scale your infrastructure, advantages in terms of reliability, improved security and compliance over solely on-premises infrastructures. We discuss these benefits in detail below.
Scalability and Flexibility
Public cloud services offer a seamless solution that allows users to dynamically scale up or down to accommodate fluctuations in data, applications, and services. From test environments to production runs, this advantage becomes increasingly apparent. In today’s ever-changing computing landscape, market demand can be highly unpredictable, which underscores the criticality of a company’s response agility. Given the substantial variations in demand, an organization’s ability to effortlessly scale and provide services from the most efficient platform and infrastructure becomes indispensable.
Flexibility, on the other hand, reflects the ability of a business to migrate data, applications, and services among infrastructures to achieve goals like scale, performance, cost optimization, and security, among other drivers. When that demand changes for resources, flexibility is the cornerstone of an agile response. Using a single platform to orchestrate and respond to your businesses needs quickly and at scale is an example of how to reduce complexity in favor of performance.
Cost Optimization
Scaling and maintaining in-house infrastructure can be costly and time consuming. Using the public cloud to expand your available resources can be less expensive and give you access to on-demand and seemingly infinite storage and computing resources. Using cloud infrastructures can also alleviate the need for significant investment in on-premises solutions.
Rather than paying for on-premises infrastructure and subsequent upgrades to frequently meet those compliance requirements and deploy new workloads , organizations can use cloud configurations to minimize overhead. Tools such as Google Cloud Pricing Calculator provide businesses insights on their cloud computing bills. Speak with your cloud provider for deals and opportunities to scale your cloud solutions at the right cost. Also, utilize a single hybrid or multi cloud backup solution to save you in the long run with one centrally managed tool to monitor it all. Alleviating the need to use multiple backup point products can free up time, money and resources to work on the things that are most important to your business.
Most cloud providers offer a variety of pricing models, including pay-as-you-use, reserved instances, and traditional monthly rentals. Providers may also base pricing on computing resources used, operations performed, or volume of data transferred. Speak with your cloud provider for information about products and service tiers that might suit your specific use case.
If you aren’t using a cloud backup solution, single hybrid or multi-cloud backup options with integrated monitoring solutions can also save you time and money in the long term.
Enhanced Security and Compliance
Cloud services providers manage their clients’ hardware and network infrastructure for their clients, reducing the burden faced by in-house IT teams to upgrade and upkeep on-premises solutions. Under the shared responsibility model used by most cloud services providers, application security remains the user’s responsibility, while the provider handles ongoing maintenance of the underlying infrastructure.
A cloud services provider can also be useful from a compliance perspective. For example, Microsoft Azure and other major cloud services providers help clients maintain compliance with U.S. and global regulatory requirements. When choosing a cloud provider, check the level of compliance offered with each service. Often, the public cloud platform is suitable for general commercial use. However, organizations with strict compliance requirements, such as those who handle government or military contracts, may need to host their applications on specific compliance offerings.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Cloud service providers have multiple data centers so if an outage occurs, you could easily spin up instances elsewhere and maintain normal operations. This wouldn’t be an option for on-premises infrastructures, which makes hybrid and multi-cloud architectures more favorable for disaster recovery (DR).
Challenges in Hybrid Cloud Management
Even though they offer a host of benefits, some hybrid cloud environments can be complex and challenging to manage. Key considerations for successful hybrid cloud deployments are outlined below.
Complexity and Integration
It can be challenging to monitor the status of servers and services across multiple environments while also managing data transfers between them. So, IT teams may need to invest in tools or a managed service provider (MSP) to manage their cloud services.
Security Concerns
A hybrid cloud architecture may create a bigger attack surface, so it’s critical to have a security-first mindset. Using and coordinating Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools to maintain security is essential, as these will alert you to anomalous events (including failed logins, session hijacking, and stolen access tokens) which may otherwise fly under the radar.
Compliance and Governance
Some organizations process highly sensitive data and may be subject to higher regulatory requirements that disqualify standard cloud deployments. Products such as Google for Government or Google Cloud for Federal Civilian Agencies are designed with such compliance requirements in mind.
Key Components of Hybrid Cloud Management
Several tools can help IT teams manage their hybrid cloud environments, including overseeing cloud deployments. These cover key areas of on-premises and cloud management, including:
- Container/instance orchestration and automation
- Performance monitoring
- SIEM
- Data backups and encryption
- Workload optimization
Rather than monitoring infrastructures that are spread across multiple providers or environments through tool sets and vendors, IT teams increasingly consolidate those tools to drive efficiency in their hybrid cloud management. These tools also can increase visibility into your cloud environment’s performance, workloads, and stability.
Hybrid Cloud Management Strategies
Managing a hybrid cloud infrastructure requires a slightly different approach compared to a more traditional infrastructure. Follow the best practices below as you prepare to migrate your workloads to the cloud.
- Define clear roles and responsibilities for team members that work across your hybrid cloud ecosystem. This includes establishing policies for security and compliance and configuring your infrastructure so your team fully understands resource and account management.
- Review the service level agreements (SLAs) for potential cloud providers while considering account uptime, pricing, latency, and data availability. Discounted fees may not be worth it if availability or uptime guarantees will mismatch your organization’s needs.
- Break your existing infrastructure into workloads and determine whether you want to place them in private or public cloud environments or keep them on-premises. Where possible, use cloud-native microservices as opposed to monolithic workloads.
- Develop a comprehensive zero-trust approach to security and thoroughly evaluate regulatory compliance for all your deployments. Familiarize yourself with the shared responsibility model to ensure you know which security aspects are your responsibility and which fall to your cloud services provider.
If your organization has been using monolithic applications that run on on-premises servers, a full hybrid/multi-cloud migration may take some time. Consider refactoring your workloads to use microservices, which will gradually breaking up monolithic applications to enhance their stability, scalability, and performance.
Hybrid Cloud Management Tools
Managing a hybrid cloud infrastructure may require more comprehensive tooling and capabilities compared to a single infrastructure (e.g., on-premises only). Systems administrators may be comfortable with the command line and an SSH client, but as organizations transition to the cloud and a microservices approach, they need to adopt hybrid cloud management platforms for greater insight and efficiency.
A hybrid or multi-cloud administrator may need several cloud management tools, including:
- Container orchestration
- Security and package management tools
- Monitoring and analytics
- Cost management solutions
Hybrid and multi-cloud management tools, like Nutanix Cloud Manager and Control Plane, can help IT managers monitor their cloud deployments and provide insight into resource usage, the health of their instances, and cloud expenditure. These tools also empower organizations to take control of their resource usage, helping them maintain stable online services while minimizing cloud spending.
Having centralized tools for cloud management becomes increasingly important as your organization grows. When multiple departments use cloud services, it can be difficult for one person or team to keep up with each instance’s use, especially across multiple platforms. Hybrid cloud management tools bring information from multiple sources into one central dashboard, which increases visibility and empowers systems administrators to respond to issues more quickly and accurately.
Hybrid Cloud Management Example
Ciox Health, a leader in healthcare information management, manages vast amounts of sensitive data to support providers, payers, and researchers. With more than 100,000 medical records accessed per minute across multiple cloud platforms, Ciox needed a reliable solution to ensure high availability and data security.
To meet these needs, Ciox adopted a hybrid cloud approach powered by Veeam. Using Veeam’s platform, the company ensured seamless backup and recovery across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and colocation data centers. This flexibility allowed Ciox to maintain operations without disruption, even during system failures or cyberattacks. A 3-2-1 backup strategy further protected their critical data by keeping multiple copies stored across various environments.
With Veeam, Ciox has optimized its data protection strategy, reduced infrastructure costs, and ensured that healthcare providers can access patient data 24/7, improving care delivery and patient outcomes.
Managing the Hybrid Cloud With Veeam
Hybrid cloud architectures can be a scalable, cost-effective and flexible way of delivering your IT infrastructure. However, migrating to a hybrid cloud adds some complexity compared to a purely on-premises setup.
If you’re considering adopting a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture or already managing one, explore the guides below to learn more about optimizing your cloud systems. Veeam Data Platform helps hundreds of thousands of organizations protect and secure their data across dozens of platforms, both on-premises and on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and sovereign cloud providers. Sign-up for a Free 30-day Trial of Veeam Data Platform today.