Why is hybrid cloud so challenging to implement? Or is it?

Why is hybrid cloud so challenging to implement? Or is it?

It’s well acknowledged that hybrid cloud is now the preferred IT operating model for most enterprises, offering scale, choice, speed and pay-per-use consumption, as well as adapting to fit almost any organisation’s requirements. But while it’s been estimated that around 30% of workloads have already moved to the cloud¹, the remaining 70% often appear to throw up their own challenges, for many different reasons.

As advocates for the hybrid cloud model, we’ve spoken to many customers keen to roll it out, and whilst the benefits are huge, it’s not so easy to do hybrid cloud well. Organisations are concerned about navigating the transition in the most effective and efficient way and we’ve seen the same, common concerns raised and challenges encountered, focusing mainly on the following four areas:

Complexity

Hybrid cloud, as we said, has many benefits, offering choice, flexibility and efficiency but it can also be quite complex to ‘keep on top’ of multiple IT delivery sources, each with their own characteristics and interfaces. Public and private clouds are very different environments, and building and managing workloads on them require a diverse range of tooling, technology and skills. There is a real challenge around understanding where to place which workloads in a hybrid cloud to best fit the needs of your organisation, and running both environments side by side can be complex.

Visibility

With multiple services running on multiple clouds, both on and off premises, understanding who is running what and where, how much is being spent by which groups and departments often ends up in a spreadsheet exercise. Every cloud vendor offers their own set of tools for monitoring consumption and spend, which can cause confusion when it comes to getting a unified view across all clouds. This can result in security threats, overspend and wasted resources. Accountability and governance are important in order to keep your cloud secure and efficient.

Compliance

There is a growing set of business and technical rules that organisations must adhere to when it comes to cloud. Jumping into cloud too fast can leave you open to financial penalties and reputational damage if you don’t have a solid foundation for compliance. If you’re offering services from the cloud, you must have a proper compliance framework in place to ensure your own organisation and that of your end customer is not at risk.

Skills gap

As hybrid cloud adoption has grown, we’ve seen a real shortage of the skills needed in IT teams to support and optimise the strategies required to build, run and operate a successful hybrid cloud. Having the right team in place with the right skills and experience to ensure your hybrid cloud is running at optimal efficiency is crucial to success.

What’s the solution?

It’s essential to combine the right people, process and technology to alleviate the concerns and challenges associated with hybrid cloud – there is no quick fix or ‘silver bullet’! With the right mix of these three elements, a world-class, cohesive set of solutions and services can be created, so that your organisation can focus on business outcomes and staying ahead of competitors, rather than battling with IT hardware and software solutions and worrying about whether you’re getting the best value.

The first step is to simplify through a single, common, consistent experience across all clouds with secure and role-based access to the information and services you and your teams need, to help you make the right decisions and maximise the potential of hybrid cloud.

The second step is to adopt a consumption model that allows you to better align your IT spend with your actual consumption of resources across public and private clouds, to ensure best value for money.

When we brought together all our hybrid cloud-related services into one offering, we did so with the primary aim of simplifying the adoption of hybrid cloud for customers. HPE GreenLake Cloud Services address the entire cloud lifecycle; design, build, manage, run and operate as well as optimising the cloud environment, reducing the complexity of managing a hybrid estate and providing cloud as a service in a pay-per-use consumption model (HPE GreenLake).

By bringing together the HPE GreenLake pay-per-use consumption model with a comprehensive portfolio of hybrid cloud services, and making these simple to access, trial and consume (through the HPE GreenLake Central cloud platform), you can bring the cloud experience into the data centre to accelerate innovation whilst avoiding a large capital outlay. HPE GreenLake Cloud Services brings the public cloud experience across all IT, with the flexibility to choose where you run your workloads, without added complexity or cost to achieve it. ‘As-a-Service’ solutions are a rising trend, helping organisations to create a best in class architected environment, bespoke to their needs and without any excess costs for pre-packaged services they don’t require.

With this in mind, we know that cloud is not a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Every organisation has differing needs and business objectives and as experts in this space, we understand how important building a clear strategy is in order to navigate your own hybrid cloud migration. By taking away the complexity associated with cloud and reducing the risks related with migrating, organisations can focus on their business, building innovation, attracting new customers and growing revenues whilst also optimising KPIs around cost and compliance.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the journey to hybrid cloud, do get in touch.

James Henry

WW Product Specialist & BDM for GreenLake Cloud Services

¹ IDC Cloud Pulse Q1 2020. https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US46396720