As organizations increasingly look to leverage the benefits of both on-premises and cloud environments, hybrid cloud architecture has gained traction. Today, 75% of organizations worldwide have adopted a hybrid cloud strategy.
However, hybrid IT isn’t for everyone. Successfully implementing a hybrid cloud strategy – including determining the best location for critical assets and ensuring optimal performance across various environments – requires thoughtful planning and careful consideration.
Here are six key questions to ask when building a hybrid cloud strategy:
What is the total cost of ownership?
Cloud computing has many benefits, including scalability, agility, and cost efficiency. Despite these advantages, as cloud expenses increase, many organizations struggle to reconcile its long-term cost implications. As the saying goes, “It’s cheap to fail in the cloud but expensive to succeed.”
A key issue is that businesses aren’t effectively managing their cloud expenditure, wasting up to 30% of their cloud spending on unused or idle resources or over-provisioning others.
Meanwhile, others are finding they can manage, host, and procure IT workloads more cost-effectively in their own data centers – spurring a shift toward cloud repatriation.
For example, in 2015, file storage company Dropbox famously bucked the cloud-first trend and began moving user files away from AWS onto its custom-designed infrastructure. The cost savings were immediate. In a year alone, Dropbox saved $39.5 million in revenue and an additional $35.1 million in operating costs.
The takeaway is that if your primary use of the cloud is for storage purposes, the financial viability may not be compelling, and hosting data on-premises could be a more cost-effective solution.
However, the cloud excels in other use cases. Workloads such as big data processing and analysis, application development and testing, and other computationally intensive tasks can significantly reduce capital expenditure when performed in the cloud.
What are your data ownership requirements?
Data ownership ensures control over your data’s use, storage, and access. It safeguards data integrity and sensitive information, aids compliance, and fosters a competitive advantage.
Clarity around data ownership of data has emerged at the forefront thanks to the rise of AI and large language models (LLMs). Current cloud-based or single-service delivery models, like ChatGPT, carry significant risks. Data used to train these models can be misused, shared, and potentially expose proprietary information. On-premises AI infrastructure is an excellent option to mitigate these risks and maintain control over sensitive data.
Data ownership is also vital in highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare, where on-premises infrastructure can provide superior control and security.
That said, cloud computing offers numerous ways to address data concerns, especially if LLMs and AI modeling are not top priorities for your organization. For instance, the cloud’s shared responsibility model ensures you retain ownership of your data, while the provider manages the underlying infrastructure. Additionally, cloud providers must comply with data protection regulations and offer transparent contractual terms that clarify data protocols and ownership rights.
Be sure to check the fine print so you can make informed decisions about where your data is hosted, processed, and accessed.
Do you operate globally?
Another crucial factor is globalization. Multinational companies (MNCs) often leverage cloud services over on-premises for geographical diversity, scalability, and compliance reasons. For instance, to comply with data regulations, such as GDPR, MNCs need the flexibility to distribute workloads across various regions. When operations are centralized in a single location, such as an on-premises data center, complying with the rules and regulations of every country or region where the company operates is a massive challenge.
In addition, having data close to global business units ensures data ownership, control, and accessibility. In-region cloud providers can deliver these benefits. For example, Dropbox still relies on AWS to serve customers in places where prices differ and it needs scale, including the UK, Europe, and Japan. This exemplifies the appeal of hybrid IT – it allows organizations to keep their options open.
What is your disaster recovery plan?
When evaluating a hybrid IT infrastructure, carefully assess your disaster recovery goals. While the cost of on-premises hardware has decreased, making on-prem backup feasible, cloud services offer significant advantages, such as the ability to backup data across multiple geographic locations – enhancing data resilience.
Your disaster recovery plan should balance the strengths of both cloud and on-premises solutions.
How will you manage and monitor the hybrid environment?
Achieving comprehensive visibility into service health is crucial in a hybrid IT environment. While monitoring on-premises systems is typically more straightforward because you have physical access to boxes, pipes, and switches, managing workloads and data across cloud and on-premises settings requires a more nuanced approach. You need a monitoring strategy that prioritizes closing visibility gaps and provides a unified view of your IT infrastructure’s performance and overall health.
Additionally, choose a tool that delivers service-level insights to assess the impact of IT issues on business services and proactively address potential problems before they cause service disruptions.
What are your staffing goals?
When planning your hybrid cloud strategy, consider your staffing objectives.
The cloud can mitigate the overhead of maintaining IT infrastructure and reduce the need for in-house IT expertise. However, with tech salaries dropping to their lowest point in five years and tech hiring cooling down, now may be a more affordable time to staff a data center than in recent years.
Navigating the complexities of hybrid cloud
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to hybrid cloud. Even when on-premises infrastructure is a logical choice, some workloads may be better suited for the cloud, and vice versa. It all comes down to each workload’s specific needs, budget, compliance requirements, data ownership issues, business objectives, etc.
Whichever path you choose, use insights from a hybrid cloud monitoring solution like ScienceLogic to fine-tune and optimize your strategy.
With the ScienceLogic AI platform, you can monitor performance across your hybrid infrastructure and dive deep into the data to compare cloud deployments vs. on-premises. From here you can assess which approach excels in terms of performance, cost, security, backup, and compliance so you can refine and adjust your hybrid IT strategy accordingly.
Learn more about how you can eliminate visibility gaps with hybrid cloud monitoring.
