Elevology Blog

Hybrid clouds are complicated. When you’re moving workloads between public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises locations, you need to maintain management and control of your data, applications, and services to reflect a high standard of data monitoring, security, and authentication. One of the most chronic pains in any company’s journey to hybrid cloud comes from a fairly simple source: attempting to move a large amount of data from one location to another.

The amount of data in today’s enterprise landscape is huge and constantly growing. Organizations are hamstrung by the amount of the data they need to move. However, while other areas of cloud and networking technologies have made strides, data mobility remains one of the industry’s oldest and most frustrating problems. Many companies are currently facing the same bottlenecks they discovered when public clouds were first introduced to the market.

Cloud computing and adopting a cloud-first/cloud-native/born-in-the-cloud mentality continue to dominate data center conversations. However, although more and more businesses are taking advantage of the cloud’s benefits, the reality is that for organizations with cost and security considerations, which is most, a hybrid environment of on-premises and cloud services will continue to be the norm for the foreseeable future. Despite that, organizations are still able to realize the agility and efficiency that cloud-first organizations experience by embracing the core principles of a DevOps culture into their environments.

First, however, it’s important to distinguish between the two terms: DevOps is a process and culture more likely to be associated with cloud-native organizations —especially those in the business of developing software applications. Whereas hybrid IT is simply another method of delivering IT services to endusers. However, they are 100% compatible and DevOps’ core tenets of increased collaboration, continuous integration, and delivery of services (all with a greater focus on enduser quality) can and should be applied to hybrid IT.

Over the past several years, conversations around cloud computing have shifted from “why cloud?” to “how can we best implement cloud?” As cloud computing continues to mature, organizations will move away from the “one size fits all” approach and leverage customized cloud solutions becoming more competitive and agile in adapting to the new way of working.

Customizable Cloud Model

No two businesses are exactly alike, each coming with its own set of unique challenges and opportunities. Why is it then that so many businesses accept a cookie cutter cloud model? Often times, businesses do it under the guise it will save them time and/or money. However in reality, a blanket cloud or infrastructure strategy can leave businesses restricted to the confines of the predetermined system, which ultimately costs more in the long run as their needs evolve.

Once a source of much confusion among the C-Suite, cloud adoption is now a question of the past. According to a recent IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study, almost 75% of organizations have applications or infrastructure in the cloud. That figure will only increase.

So, what comes next? Now that the majority of businesses have achieved some level of cloud deployment, it’s time for organizations to take it to the next level. IT departments and business executives must gear up to further integrate, scale, and simplify their company’s cloud investments.

Many IT professionals believe if it isn’t broken don't fix it. A recent survey found that 50% to 60% of core processes in some verticals still run on mainframe systems using legacy, often poorly maintained software. After all, it still works.

Resistance to modernization does not come only from an “if it isn’t broken” attitude. Change brings risk, so it might appear prudent to delay major infrastructure changes. Also, many large organizations have sizeable investments in mainframes loaded with years of accumulated data and that data may have been incorporated into monolithic mainframe software applications.