The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 78

2. Understand security and governance
These days, security and governance are a requirement,
whether a mandate from your customers (see “SLAs”) or
from your senior management. This means you need to
proactively manage security to make it work. You can also
leverage new mechanisms such as identity and access man-
agement (IAM), which allow assigning of identities to data,
people, devices, and servers, to configure who can access
what, and when. Finally, information needs to be encrypted
at-rest in some cases, and in-flight in others.
Core to this part of hybrid cloud management is how you
deal with a few issues:
• Security and performance. If the needs of the work-
load are that information be encrypted at-rest (on
the storage systems in the private or public cloud), or
in-flight (moving over the network), that may result
in the risk of lower overall performance. That needs
to be understood and managed, including the use of
performance monitoring tools.
• Policy management. Governance requires that poli-
cies are written and enforced, and this enforcement
needs to be understood by those who are managing
the hybrid cloud so that they do not conflict or other-
wise get in the way of operations.
3. Build a “single pane of glass”
Those who manage hybrid cloud manage complexity,
because the private and public clouds all come with their
own native APIs and resources. Indeed, they all manage
storage, networking, provisioning and security differently.
Thus, you can either learn all of the native interfaces for all
private and public clouds, or you can instead build a single
pane of glass that abstracts you away from that
complexity.
76 | THE DOPPLER | SPECIAL EDITION 2019
There are tools that can manage the cloud services using a
single interface to translate what something means on one
cloud versus another cloud. For instance, you need to moni-
tor performance on Google Cloud Platform, and OpenStack
private cloud, and Amazon Web Services. All provide differ-
ent approaches and interfaces to manage performance, and
the single pane of glass interface deals with the differences
on your behalf, translating what’s important to those who
manage the hybrid cloud in and between the different clouds
that are under management.
4. Understand the SLAs
SLAs, or Service Level Agreements, are a contract with the
end users stating that you, the hybrid cloud manager, and
the cloud providers themselves, will supply a specific level
of service, else there will be penalties. While you can cer-
tainly pass the buck to the public cloud provider in living up
to their own SLAs, the hybrid cloud itself is your baby, and
thus you’ll be held responsible if the system misses the lim-
its outlined in the SLAs you’ve agreed to.
At a high level, what’s defined in the SLA needs to be
defined in the management layer as well. It’s not just about
providing a baseline of good performance to the end users,
but it’s about providing performance that meets specific
expectations. For instance, the ability to provide a sub-sec-
ond response to the sales person leveraging the inventory
application that exists within the hybrid cloud.
When it comes to hybrid cloud management, SLAs are not
legal tools. But they are a way to define user and business
expectations. Thus, it’s easy to leverage these expectations
to define the service expectations that need to be managed
by the hybrid cloud management layer, and the hybrid
cloud managers. Use them as guidelines.