In their quest for agile infrastructure using hybrid multicloud, have enterprises fully considered the operational and security complexities?
Before examining these challenges, let’s review why organizations have adopted hybrid multicloud in the first place.
Hybrid cloud is defined as a mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premises infrastructure and cloud services (private cloud or public cloud). Multicloud is simply the use of cloud services from two or more cloud providers. It often rests on open source, cloud-native technologies and may include capabilities that make it possible to manage workloads across multiple public and private clouds from a central console, sometimes referred to as a “single pane of glass.”
With multicloud, enterprises can have compute, development, storage, disaster recovery (DR), and business continuity (BC) spanning a virtualized on-demand environment. Beyond these core purposes, multicloud can be harnessed to support elastic applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Multicloud offers price advantages and avoids vendor lock-in, of course, but it also promises a more agile, flexible way to add and remove capabilities as needed. This infrastructure flexibility via the cloud is essential from a business continuity perspective.
During the global disruptions of the past two years, “those companies that had already adopted cloud or could quickly do so were able to sustain their businesses,” says Michelle Weston, director and global portfolio leader for Security and Resiliency at Kyndryl, adding, “from a technology point of view, we saw a lot of innovation and innovative business models.”
According to the “Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report,” based on a survey of 750 global cloud decision-makers and users:
Yet on-premises systems are still widely used. Flexera’s survey also found that 80% of the respondents have a hybrid-cloud strategy.
Why on-premises systems? For starters, there may be technical debt in legacy applications that makes it difficult or prohibitively expensive to move them to the cloud. Or an organization may have decided to retain its on-premises infrastructure because of security or risk concerns. In other cases, coordinating these applications across hyperscalers such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure adds onto the complexity, given their different feature sets and APIs. The on-premises choice may also be driven by data governance or regional regulatory requirements.
Just figuring out the ROI of a digital transformation (net new clients, incremental revenue, competitive advantage) may stymie an organization’s progress along this path.
“There’s going to be pressure to maintain a hybrid cloud model for quite some time,” says Mike Lyons, chief technology officer for the Network and Edge Global Practice at Kyndryl.