The rapid growth in cloud adoption might suggest that every workload businesses currently have on-premise is destined for some sort of cloud-based service. The reality is that, other than for small companies, that's probably not the case.
Entrusting key applications to a third party requires intelligent planning in many areas such as management, portability, security and support requirements. What can IT organizations do to reduce risks, tame the complexity and increase their potential for success? We spoke to Jerry McLeod, vice president of business development at hybrid cloud management provider HotLink to find out.
BN: The cloud is rapidly becoming the norm for many businesses. How important is it to choose the right provider?
JM: It's critically important to choose the right cloud provider; it's one of the most important IT decisions most businesses will make. However, no one provider is right for every business. There are some cloud options that have a wider portfolio of robust features, but are essentially self-service. At the other end of the spectrum are providers that offer more of a managed service. The 'right' provider for any individual business could actually be a mix-and-match of cloud services, but that will depend on your workloads and support needs, which can change over time.
BN: As more enterprises choose a mix-and-match approach for cloud providers, what struggles do they face in terms of managing those resources?
JM: There is certainly operational complexity related to managing multiple cloud providers. If you're administering several platforms -- say, Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2 and OpenStack -- monitoring, managing and automating those resources individually becomes a real challenge for IT teams.
However, the reality for most enterprises is even more difficult, because they're building hybrid IT infrastructures that span internal and external resources. So, at the same time teams have to figure out how to manage a spectrum of cloud alternatives, they're also grappling with managing existing on-premise virtual infrastructure and platforms like vCenter, Hyper-V, XenServer or KVM. The difficulty inherent in doing that can threaten the benefits that draw companies to the cloud in the first place: reduced cost, increased agility and faster time to market.
BN: Most organizations will be worried about security when moving to the cloud. What can they do to minimize vulnerability during migration?
JM: Many cloud providers are more secure than some on-premise data centers. Why? Because they have spent years making them that way. Businesses should be worried about their security all the time, not just when the cloud is involved. Unfortunately, many companies believe they're secure simply because they're on premise, even if they don't have a security expert on staff to assess their risk. When those businesses move to the cloud, they gain a team of security professionals who are constantly updating security to stay ahead of evolving threats. During the migration itself, companies can minimize their vulnerability with a tool that creates a VPN tunnel between their on-premise systems and the cloud with secure agent proxies.
BN: Isn't having your applications and data in the cloud always going to be riskier than keeping them in house?
JM: Physically, the cloud is more secure than most companies' data centers. I equate it to the difference between the deadbolts you might have on your house and the purpose-built buildings your bank uses -- there's just no question which one is more secure. Cloud providers build their businesses on security, and they have the infrastructure and personnel power to keep their sites safe.
BN: What are the challenges of the cloud when it comes to ensuring business continuity?
JM: The cloud's economics make it feasible for companies to have a comprehensive data protection solution for all their workloads, not just their critical workloads. That encompasses backup, data replication, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional, physical DR/BC sites. Comprehensive cloud data protection is now an option for everyone. However, cloud providers don't deliver business continuity. Each individual company has to be responsible for that by adopting adequate tools, processes and plans. If you don't have a business continuity plan for managing your infrastructure, then it's on you when there's a failure.
BN: What are the keys to ensuring an early return on cloud investments?
JM: An apples-to-apples comparison is the key to ensuring ROI. What are your on-premise costs and what will the same usage cost in the cloud? People tend to assume the cloud is almost free, so they end up running three times as many applications in the cloud as they did on premise; that won't be cheaper. Let's say you're paying 10 cents per instance per hour, for example. That's around $1,000 per year. Multiply that by 20 or 30 instances, and it adds up quickly. To make sure you're not chewing through your potential savings, first make sure you understand what your on-premise costs are, and then closely monitor and manage your cloud usage.
BN: Are there times when the cloud simply isn’t the right approach?
JM: If you're running, say, a large logistics company using internal mainframes in secure data centers around the world, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to move everything to the cloud right now. There are critical enterprise workloads that may never be well suited to the cloud. For those companies, it makes sense to have some workloads in the cloud and some on premise.
HotLink has been working with companies since 2011 to streamline the management of those types of hybrid environments, and we recently released HotLink Cloud Management Express to take that to the next level. For enterprises with multiple cloud providers and several on-premise resources, the ability to unify management and administration into a single, familiar interface such as VMware vCenter means that 'the right approach' can be a multi-faceted one that is also intuitive and flexible.
Image Credit: everything possible/Shutterstock
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