May 13, 2023 | By Greg Dougherty
If your IT department hasn’t yet considered a cloud-based environment, color us surprised. The shift towards enterprise hybrid cloud-based systems, in particular, shows no signs of stopping. The public cloud offers clear benefits to businesses, but the private cloud boasts the latency and security features many organizations need.
A hybrid cloud involves keeping these private and public clouds communicating seamlessly, with the benefits of both. But is your enterprise ready for hybrid cloud migration? Follow these six steps to make sure.
Hybrid Cloud Readiness: Choose Your Cloud Provider
With the rapid growth in the hybrid cloud industry comes an overwhelming amount of vendor options. A few well-known names stand out in searches, and each come with their own set of benefits. But the variety of options available now allows you the freedom to choose a service provider that fits your unique needs and requirements.
One such provider is Veeam, offering a suite of robust and versatile solutions for data backup, recovery, and replication that can work with any cloud, be it public, private, or hybrid.
The first step in testing compatibility and enterprise hybrid cloud readiness is to have a small list of vendors to compare and research. The choice of provider should be made by thoroughly assessing services offered by each and deciphering how those services align with your enterprise.
Hybrid To-Do: Examining Data & Vendor Options
Investigate your current data and your options for transitioning to a hybrid cloud environment. Do your research on how each of these will affect your company’s IT environment, such as uptime, security, latency, storage space, and bandwidth requirements. It’s also essential to ensure that your data is up-to-date. You shouldn’t base any decisions on information that’s already out of date, as this could lead to an unreliable infrastructure that doesn’t actually solve any of your organization’s problems.
Hybrid Cloud Readiness: Pick Your Level of Support
An undeniable benefit of running applications on the cloud is the plethora of services available to you. For example, AWS offers over 200 services that can support your application. Most providers provide granular access management settings that limit user profiles from performing restricted actions when imposed.
An in-depth look at the alignment of available cloud services with your business objectives will help ensure you have the proper reliability and availability when you move forward.
Hybrid To-Do: Defining Goals & Requirements
Identifying business objectives and requirements is an important step in any transition. You can’t tell whether or not a hybrid system will mitigate your organization’s biggest pain points without understanding what those are. Understanding exactly what needs to be improved makes it significantly easier to outline realistic goals and identify exactly what your organization needs.
More to Consider: “Managed” Backups-as-a-Service: a Single Word Makes the Difference
Hybrid Cloud Readiness: Check Compliance Requirements
Another essential step in ensuring compatibility is fully understanding your compliance requirements before transitioning to the cloud. Ensure the cloud provider you’ve selected has the required certifications to comply with any government policies pertaining to sensitive information you handle over the public cloud.
For example, The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council published revisions to their guidelines in 2013 concerning cloud environments, specifying that “There is shared responsibility between the cloud service provider (CSP) and its clients” when protecting credit card information.
In short, be sure any systems you’re considering have been independently verified and are in compliance with relevant regulations for data in your industry.
Hybrid To-Do: Creating a Business Continuity Plan
The implementation of an organization-wide plan can greatly increase your chances of avoiding disasters. Without proper preparation, even the most reliable systems can fail. As a result, productivity is reduced to zero while you scramble to resolve the problem. If you have a disaster plan in place that outlines how you will handle any system failures, you will be able to continue operating without interruptions.
Hybrid Cloud Readiness: Evaluate Application Scalability
Scalability in applications that run on the cloud is of the utmost importance. The whole point of using an enterprise hybrid cloud setup is to take advantage of the public cloud’s scalability and convenience to reduce the burden on on-premise systems.
The best option is to consider segmenting your applications and deciding which apps make sense to host on public versus private clouds. You can start by listing those requiring the most control, security, confidentiality, and monitoring. Those apps more than likely should be hosted in your private cloud.
Hybrid Cloud Readiness: Prep Your Staff
Moving to an enterprise hybrid cloud strategy means you or your team members may need to add to their skillset. Consider making your organization’s transition to a hybrid cloud model an opportunity to broaden the scope of traditional IT jobs like infrastructure engineering and software development.
This can empower your IT team and effectively restructure it to support a hybrid cloud deployment. Best of all, restructuring doesn’t always have to mean hiring and firing, as organizations that have successfully moved to a hybrid cloud model have found.
Hybrid To-Do: Educating Employees
Despite the importance of technical aspects of a hybrid cloud, it isn’t nearly as useful if your employees don’t know how to use it or interact with it. Training on the technology behind the cloud and how to use it is crucial to proper implementation and its success thereafter. For your employees to smoothly transition into the new system, you need an orientation program that explains what the different features of the system do and how they may be affected by its execution.
Hybrid Cloud Readiness: Migrate in Phases
Instead of being brought to a standstill with one massive migration, it can be worth the time and energy to break it down into phases. This is best executed by first identifying processes, applications, or tools you could easily migrate to a public cloud system.
These initial migrations can act as pilot projects, providing your team with the opportunity to adjust to the intricacies of smaller workloads before tackling a more extensive migration. It also allows the opportunity to evaluate whether applications require updates before, during, or after deployment.
Veeam’s flexible and scalable solutions can help facilitate this phased approach to cloud migration, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption to your business operations.
Hybrid To-Do: Creating a Pilot Program
There are always going to be errors when changing systems. Creating a pilot program that allows your business to understand how different pieces of the system function, as well as identify any problems, is an excellent way to test out a potential migration. You can drastically improve your chances of a successful transition and avoid spending months or years dealing with issues.
What You Need to Keep in Mind When Considering Hybrid Cloud for Your Business
Even though companies should avoid jumping into a new system unprepared, preparation does not cease after migration. The preparedness plan will need to be updated and revamped as your business continues to use its hybrid cloud platform. You are thus prepared for whatever the future may hold for your business.
Taking a step-by-step approach can simplify and mitigate any issues along the way, even if the transition to a hybrid cloud-based system seems daunting. Identify your business’ biggest pain points and determine what kind of system might help solve those problems first. By understanding this, you are able to outline your organization’s goals and find the right solution to move forward.
Piloting a potential migration through pilot groups and orientations increases your chances of a successful transition and ensures that your employees understand how to interact with and use the system. Making sure each employee knows what each feature does and how it might affect them is key to a smooth implementation, and creating a business continuity plan that outlines potential problems and how to fix them allows your business to operate as usual. Finally, updating your plan as your business evolves ensures you’re always prepared for what the future has in store.
Opti9 hybrid cloud is the solution to help you achieve your transformation objectives while operating. It’s an innovative approach to cloud management that allows businesses to seamlessly move applications between public and private infrastructure, placing each of their apps in the optimal environment. You can finally create a seamless experience between old and new technologies without sacrificing control over how your data is managed.
With our unique hybrid cloud platform, we give you complete visibility into all of your applications across both on-premises and public clouds so you can make informed decisions about where they should be deployed based on business needs. We also provide automated discovery, analysis, planning, migration, optimization and reporting capabilities with full support for AWS.
Blending the best parts of private and public clouds is an attractive prospect for businesses in today’s rapidly changing tech landscape, but your readiness is what determines its worth. Find out what your move to the hybrid cloud looks like. Schedule a free consultation with Opti9 today.