The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 13

Although it’s been a long road, enterprise IT is finally achieving a general awareness of
the benefits of cloud computing. While a picture of cloud is emerging in their thinking
and strategic planning, the path between the “here and now” and the rosy cloud future
tends to be murky. These companies’ future cloud environments are variously described
using phrases such as multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, cloud bursting, distributed cloud and
even fog computing. While any of these represent topics sufficient for a whole series of
articles, let’s just look at the two terms that are often confused, yet are likely to be the
most important over the next few years: hybrid cloud and multi-cloud.
Hybrid Cloud
No large enterprise, no matter how well prepared, can simply leap to the cloud in one fell
swoop, even if the goal is to migrate completely to a public cloud provider such as AWS,
Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. There is going to be a necessary transition
period, during which the enterprise will have some resources, systems and workload
capabilities that have been migrated to public cloud, while others remain in the enter-
prise data centers or colo hosting centers. This interoperability is a common example of
a hybrid cloud.
Unless an organization is literally “born in the cloud” (built on the public cloud for essen-
tial infrastructure and product/service delivery, plus supporting SaaS services such as
web-based email, Salesforce and Zendesk), every enterprise’s cloud journey must
include preparation for simultaneously supporting a cloud infrastructure and a legacy
infrastructure. This requires conscious decisions about the level of integration vs. isola-
tion that will be achieved between the data center side and the cloud side.
For many organizations, it may be tempting to simply graft a separate cloud environ-
ment alongside their traditional data centers, so as to minimize disruption of the existing
internal operations and the introductions of new tools into existing environments. How-
ever, this path leads to increasing complexity, as more and more functions have to be
simultaneously performed in multiple environments. So while hybrid cloud architectures
vary, it is a best practice to anticipate the need to develop and deploy integrated plat-
forms and architectures wherever practical.
Here are some characteristics that are typical of successful hybrid cloud environments:
• A centralized identity infrastructure that applies across multiple environments
• Persistent, secure high-speed connectivity between the enterprise and the cloud
environment
• Integrated networking that securely extends the corporate network, creating a
segmented but single overall network infrastructure
• Unified monitoring and resource management
SPECIAL EDITION 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 11