Modernize without compromise: Why hybrid cloud still matters
Any enterprise IT environment is a hybrid mix of modern and traditional applications. The latest and greatest, customer-facing apps are the modern face of the company, while behind the scenes are stalwart, always-on applications that do the heavy lifting.
Gartner calls this situation “bimodal” IT, and it’s a fact of life for most companies. Except for a select few digital native companies, large enterprises must contend with the fact that a significant portion of their IT estate will stubbornly remain on-premises.
Still, today’s business models and competitive drivers dictate that applications should receive regular updates, freely integrate with a variety of modern and traditional systems, and underpin flexible ways of working and consumption.
This is the driver behind so-called “private cloud” — or in other terms — onsite applications with access to highly available, feature rich, automated and commercially flexible infrastructure platforms.
During the early days of enterprise cloud adoption, private cloud was a competitive differentiator. This was a tentative step towards modernization for the most risk-averse enterprises, or those facing application restrictions and constraints allowing them to make the transition. It seemed like a positive move for those reluctant to give up the perceived security and convenience of their existing IT infrastructure. Today, however, no enterprise can afford to keep their computing 100% on premises or completely VM-based.
Hence, the emergence of the hybrid cloud model, which combines the scale and flexibility of cloud with on-premises computing’s control over networking, governance and sovereignty. Achieving the practicality of this middle road, however, necessitates cloud-like functionality on premises, tailored to the owner’s unique environment and connected and coordinated with the cloud.
Is hybrid cloud still relevant?
First of all, yes. There are many good reasons to keep at least some of your computing on-premises. There could be data sovereignty issues which require you to store data in a specific geography for regulatory or privacy reasons. You might require extremely low latency for critical applications that public cloud cannot provide.
It might be a matter of cost control (more on that later), and quite frankly, some applications are just too old and unsuitable to be migrated to public cloud. Traditional applications still need a home. Just as you wouldn’t ask your elderly grandmother to move to a youth hostel, that large and static database doesn’t belong on cloud either.
Hybrid cloud combines the scale and flexibility of cloud with greater control, reducing time to market, improving customer experience and optimizing costs while meeting compliance, security and sustainability requirements.
It’s important to note that on premises does not mean old-fashioned. You can host modern containerized applications on private cloud, but you can’t put a traditional application on public cloud without some significant changes in both application design and business processes. It can quickly become a cost and configuration nightmare.
How to make smart decisions about cloud
In the public vs. private vs. hybrid cloud debate, everyone seems to offer some variation of the same advice: Find the right balance.
While this is true, it’s not particularly useful. It’s not simply a matter of looking at your IT estate, sorting apps into different buckets, then heading off to the pub after a job well done.
Just because an app lands in a particular bucket doesn’t mean it must stay there. Application roadmaps should be cultivated, based on evolving competitive and business demands. The opportunity to modernize on-premises applications is one of the key reasons to keep them there in the first place. Doing so requires advanced on-premises infrastructure which gets close to cloud functionality, whilst amplifying the performance, compliance and control benefits of being on premises.
As we mentioned earlier, you can run a containerized application on your own infrastructure, so why not convert that old on-prem application to Kubernetes? The advantage is that you don’t have to transform all at once. You can start by re-factoring the functionality, but you don’t have to transform the processes and networking at the same time.
You have more control over your networking environment, and you don’t have to adapt to a public cloud provider’s rules, policies or pricing. You don’t have to implement advanced networking, microsegmentation or role-based access.
It may be a slower path to modernization, but it’s the smart choice. Entire enterprise environments cannot be modernized in one go, and they evolve at more than two speeds. Hybrid clouds are safer and enable you to keep security, compliance and privacy guardrails in place. It also doesn’t have to limit the functionality.
Once an old application is sufficiently modernized, you can also take the opportunity to inject modern features like AI. In fact, you can leverage the scalability and low cost of cloud to train the model, then port it to run on premises. Truly the best of both worlds.
With each application you modernize, you get closer to a truly portable infrastructure. As long as the business requirements stay consistent, you can safely keep those applications on premises, but you may find that you reach a tipping point when cloud makes more sense.
If the business drivers change — such as an increased need for scalability or more frequent releases — your application is already cloud-ready. Or, you can augment these workloads with functionality or data from a cloud-based app or database without moving the entire on-prem application to cloud. Which brings us to…
What shouldn’t I move to cloud?
It’s important to bear in mind that certain applications will never be able to move to cloud. Compliance or security requirements, high switching costs, or big static workloads are all among the barriers to moving certain apps to public cloud.
Say you own that large database we mentioned earlier. It handles large workloads that are always running on an older piece of hardware. You might consider moving it to cloud in order to eliminate cost of maintaining and updating the hardware. In the short term this may be true, but you’re just trading Capex for Opex. In the long run, the compute costs will become burdensome.
In this case, grandma belongs exactly where she is most comfortable: in her old flat. Occasionally changing a lightbulb or fixing a leaky sink is a minor inconvenience compared to constantly explaining why she now shares a bathroom with a bunch of rowdy twentysomethings. And she can enjoy the most modern conveniences without sacrificing the comfort and security of home.
The (hopefully) last word on hybrid cloud
Despite the attractiveness of public cloud, there is clearly still a place for hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. Although it’s often portrayed as the be-all and end-all of modern computing, public cloud is not right for every application.
With hybrid cloud, you can modernize without compromise — reducing time to market, improving experience and optimizing costs, while providing control over compliance, security and sustainability.
If you want to learn more about how a smart hybrid cloud approach can help bridge the gap between business and IT, we’re ready to help.
Posted on: November 14, 2024
Alec Dunn
Director of Hybrid Cloud (Office of the CTO)Member, Atos Research Community
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