Some organisations have strategically entered the Hybrid Cloud world with future forecasted architectures designed around flexibility, latency and resiliency. Some, however, have ended up in Hybrid Cloud by default – with little to no visibility on what is happening in Shadow IT.
We encourage our customers to regularly review their Hybrid Cloud strategies and plans, regardless of how strategically aligned they are. When reviewing the strategy, it is important to highlight where the ‘red-flags’ are – or the warning signs. A successful Hybrid Cloud environment is built to last in an ever-changing technology landscape, however, they always need ongoing TLC.
If you have one or more of the warning signs listed below – it may be time to review your strategy with an expert lens.
1. Users are complaining – well, more than they usually do
If you find a number of your internal users or external customers complaining has spiked, even by a small percentage, over a continued period of time. One of the key benefits of Hybrid Cloud is latency and resiliency so if you start to hear more complaints about slow loading, information ‘time-out’ error notifications or complete applications going down then this is an opportunity to review the effectiveness of your Hybrid Cloud strategy.
2. Mission critical (and once reliable) applications fall down
Again, reliability and resiliency are common benefits of a Hybrid Cloud environment – and often drives organisations to refactor, repurpose or re-architect their mission critical and legacy applications in the cloud whether that be public or private. However, most organisations don’t know how their applications will work in different environments – especially if they’re custom built inside the organisation by an internal team over decades.
This is why building or migrating these apps through containerisation, CI/CD and the likes of Docker and Kubernetes is beneficial to ensuring that the application code can run well in any environment and be backed up through refactoring. Without this, often legacy applications migrated to cloud environments (i.e. through lift-and-shift) may fall over due to coding errors, configuration bugs or security issues.
3. Cloud bills just keep growing and you don’t know why
Public cloud “bill-shock” is not uncommon in our industry. Over a period of a couple of years, it is okay to have one or two instances of unexpectedly large bills. However, if your organisation is continuously experiencing growth in cloud bills – then you may need to revisit your Hybrid Cloud strategy again.
Our team will frequently work with customers to get a handle on their public cloud costs, whether it be through one or a combination of providers. The main areas that need to be addressed are the sneaky charges that come through data egress and ingress, as well as shadow IT resources that were spun up for a project and never shut down.
When reducing cloud costs, our team will often assess the project schedule, deduplication of workloads in cloud, application sprawl, storage costs and services running in multiple locations. We’ll then look to see what can be moved off to existing on-premises investments to reduce that cost in the cloud. Keeping a handle on this over a period of time is challenging for most teams running projects and BAU environments, so it’s important to bring in expert advice when seeking visibility on your cloud costs.
4. Your team is losing time on manual and day-to-day operational tasks
For any mid-market or enterprise organisation, it’s likely that the IT team is spending way too much time on basic operational tasks and manual handling that should be automated. This is hurting the business, as new services can’t be delivered quickly, hindering the motivation of your technology team.
Automation is one of the most beneficial components of Hybrid Cloud. We will often design automated infrastructure management systems that can allocate where workloads should sit, how quickly and autonomously they can be spun up, and shifted throughout the organisation without hours of manual handling and system configuration. These automation capabilities spread across infrastructure mobilisation, integration, cost management, security compliance settings and CI/CD. With these capabilities enabled, this means technical teams can focus on the fun stuff – like innovation and operational optimisation.
5. You don’t have visibility of the entire environment in one view
In most cases, no news is good news. In a Hybrid Cloud environment, no news is bad news. Without full 24/7/365 visibility of your Hybrid Cloud environment in real time, you have no way of understanding if the environment is functioning well and according to the strategy. Let alone the cost and security risks.
Full visibility of your Hybrid Cloud environment, in a single source dashboard with key success metrics, should be a major priority for any organisation looking to maintain while improving their entire IT environment.
Parallel to this, setting measurable goals for your Hybrid Cloud environment should be considered a top priority. Some of these goals can include cost management, system run-time, licence management, security compliance, support SLA’s, application and infrastructure technical debt and performance monitoring. These goals can then easily be reported back to the C-Suite and the Board to encourage communication, and future investment – as well as detect any baseline quality issues if failures begin to increase or escalations consume more resources and time.
__________
Advent One partners with Australian enterprises to drive maximum value from their Hybrid Cloud infrastructure. We use expert methodology and automation to turn complex IT infrastructure, both on-premise and in the cloud, into an orchestrated and automated single entity that gives IT teams the control and visibility they need to succeed.
Meet with Advent One to learn how you can refresh, organise and optimise your Hybrid Cloud environment. In this meeting you will learn from Advent One’s experts on how to:
- Build systems that meet regulatory and compliance requirements for data management in your Hybrid Cloud environment;
- Reduce the current total cost of ownership of your current set-up through automation and orchestration;
- Best practices for building a hybrid cloud strategy that is future-proofed and cyber resilient.
In exchange for your time, Advent One will purchase 2 Gold Class tickets for you and a plus one to enjoy a treat on us! Learn more about this offer here.