Hybrid? Yes - but how?

In the second part of this blog article, you will learn what the hybrid approach means for the IT organization, what should be considered for cloud-native applications and what roles IT and business departments play in hybrid environments.

What does the hybrid approach mean for the IT organization?

IT must be able to manage two different worlds technologically and operationally, establish control, reporting and monitoring functions and reconcile cost and billing models. Deciding which systems should be migrated to the cloud and which should remain in the data center is therefore not easy. In addition to costs, data classes, technical constraints, operating and migration costs, it must always be borne in mind that the local data center and its infrastructure must be kept technically up to date at all times.

Despite the increased complexity, there is a lot to be said for the hybrid model. Because the advantages of the cloud outweigh the disadvantages. The strategy should therefore be to provide IT from the cloud in the medium term - with the exception of systems that cannot currently be replaced or outsourced by law.

What needs to be considered for cloud-native applications in hybrid environments?

The situation is different when introducing or developing new software. This should at least be containerized and executable or even cloud-native. This brings us to a new aspect of hybrid cloud architecture. Cloud-native applications largely consist of serverless cloud services and functional code. By eliminating inflexible layers such as servers, operating systems and monolithic applications, the cloud can fully exploit its advantages: Transaction-based costs, high scalability, an availability that could never be achieved otherwise and an extremely high speed of innovation.

This comes at the cost of a certain “vendor lock-in”, as services and code are not freely interchangeable. This can be mitigated by using an automation platform that executes the deployments as code. If you want to change the public cloud provider or be flexible in a multicloud, the deployment must be transcoded. Some automation platforms already offer this function. In this case, flexibility is increased - the “vendor lock-in” is put into perspective.

What is the role of IT and the business departments in a hybrid cloud approach?

With cloud-native applications in a hybrid environment, the decision must be made as to who is responsible for the architecture and code, who maintains and develops them and who monitors the function of the applications. The approach here is “you build it - you run it”. However, this is often countered with “programmers make bad operators and operators make bad programmers”. So what does this mean in practice? Who should operate the applications - IT or the developers? The answer is: only together.

IT is often given responsibility for the entire infrastructure - i.e. for (still existing) data centers, for the basic cloud infrastructure and for all applications that are used company-wide. The specialist departments develop and operate their own software. To avoid uncontrolled growth or duplicate developments, it is advisable to establish a joint steering committee that sets standards and performs testing and auditing functions.

In hybrid scenarios, IT must also continue to monitor and distribute resources and manage costs. This is because only the IT organization has an overview of where which resources are needed and can deploy them accordingly - especially if reserved instances are used in the cloud. In addition, only IT can merge and optimize the two different cost models of the on-premises and cloud worlds and distribute costs according to their source.

Which is the right strategic approach for a hybrid cloud approach?

The aim should be to gain an overview of which systems can be operated best and most cost-effectively in which world. This also includes considering how to replace applications that do not offer the required flexibility. A tried and tested approach from practice is to carry out an assessment of the on-premises infrastructure. On this basis, a strategy can then be developed to replace legacy applications with SaaS solutions or cloud-native developments.

Conclusion

Hardly any company can manage without a hybrid scenario. The strategic decision is how long you want to remain in this scenario and how much effort you want to put into maintaining, operating and modernizing both architectures - cloud and on-premises. This is not possible without structural changes. However, these also offer new opportunities to accelerate innovation and, not least, new, interesting fields of work.

You can find out more about this in the first part of this blog article and in the eBook “We want hybrid!”, which we are happy to make available to you free of charge.

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