Hybrid Cloud Adoption Strategy for CIO

The hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from US$44.6 billion in 2018 to US$97.6 billion by 2023. 

Overview of Hybrid Cloud

Today, business is changing continuously and technology is trying to catch up with these business agilities to meet to the time to market.  Organizations are expanding their usage of cloud to maintain their competitive edge, accelerate the innovation and transform interactions with customers, employees and partners. The Pandemic has further increased the demand for speed of delivery and scale of cloud adoption.  

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), "By 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs."

Markets and Markets research quoted that, "the hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from US$44.6 billion in 2018 to US$97.6 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.0% during the forecast period."

CIOs across the industries are busy working with multiple cloud providers, essentially to retain what works and what to improve across Organization's Cloud estate. One of the fundamental decisions they need to make is how to balance the on-site, remote, public and private elements of that combination. CIO's need to derive a strategy to adopt emerging technologies to provide more business value than before. 

In addition, the CIO's security concerns regarding adoption of public cloud providers are going down while the concerns regarding Vendor lock-in are trending up. The organizations does not want to put all its eggs in one cloud provider's basket, to minimize the huge dependency.  

The major factors that CIO's need to consider before promoting Hybrid Cloud model across the organization are,   

• Do Organization has a right business culture to embrace rapid change
• What value the Hybrid Cloud bring to Organization business
• Will it help organization to lower costs, improve processes and better manage security  
• Organization readiness for New Service Model
• Organization capability to address change management in moving to a hybrid cloud adoption while maintaining business continuity
• Do organization has proper use cases for hybrid cloud adoption.  For ex: usage of packaged applications, disaster recovery setup across the multiple geographies etc. 
• Volume of  requirement for new application development on existing architectures, development of next generation applications

Hybrid Cloud addresses all the above CIO's concerns. Hybrid cloud is one of the quick solution to address Agility and Speed in terms of choosing the right workload for the right environment. 

Hybrid cloud is not a product or software service.  It is an approach to cloud computing that includes a combination of private cloud, public cloud and/or on-premise environment. The combination may include infrastructure, virtualization, bare-metal servers and/or containers. 

Hybrid cloud approach is the key solution for Organizations looking for cloud migration, managing dynamic workloads, application development acceleration, containerization of workloads, Microservices adoption and portability of services across multiple cloud platforms. 

Key Considerations for Adoption of Hybrid Cloud 

Hybrid Cloud plays a key role in increasing speed of delivery of IT resources to end-users, improve disaster recovery capabilities and for better resource utilization.  Some of the key considerations for the Hybrid cloud adoption are, 

• Visibility of Current State:  Assess the current application landscape and infrastructure across the organization to decide on the cloud migration. Complete application portfolio analysis of the Organization need to perform to decide on the cloud adoption. 
• Rate of Cloud adoption: Big bang approach is not going to fly. Based on the criticality of the applications the decision on the movement on the cloud Vs timelines need to be decided. The factors that decide on the rate of cloud adoption are, complexity of the application, data requirements, regulatory and compliance needs, modernization prerequisites, cost implications, real time requirements etc. 

• Portfolio Rationalization: Identify the business functions and the applications that are catering to these business capabilities. Re-engineer these business functions based on industry trends and Merger/acquisitions. Identify the redundant functionality across the applications and rationalize them before moving on to the Hybrid cloud.  
• Application Migration: Applications can be migrated "To and from" the data center and cloud using Hybrid Cloud model. Identify the applications that need to remain on-premise, or move to private or public cloud. This migration can be temporary or permanent depending on the enterprise strategy of migration.
• Nature of Applications: Applications that change frequently need to be move to cloud to leverage automated deployment through adoption of DevOps.  Applications that handle sensitive data to be best retained on premise. Applications with very high scalability requirements because of varied user load seasonal or timely are ideal to be hosted on the public/private cloud
• Selection of Environments: Public cloud environments are cloud service providers may not provide the specialized hardware/application components and thus not a viable option to move the application to cloud. The core idea is to choose the best environment for the application to run to deliver the functionality at the most optimal cost and effort
• Integration Strategy:  Need for connecting back the applications to historical data that resides on the on-premise servers still exist, even though the migration to cloud happens.  Various diverse integration patterns emerge as part of the modernizing the applications, handing multitude data sources covering structured and unstructured data. All these activities demand the refinement of integration strategy to be follow by the Hybrid cloud across the Organization. 
• Regulatory Requirements: Applications requiring regulatory and compliance requirements demand some of the applications/data to reside on premise. This requires deeper due diligence to select the right candidates for Hybrid cloud and the right hosting option for the application. 
• Containerization: Containerizing the applications would help in making the application cloud agnostic and move across public, private, and on-premises clouds. Containers and Microservices go together like Idly and Sambar, if we prepare wisely. Microservices and containerization of these services deployed under hybrid cloud environment. 
• Cloud interoperability: Integration between several cloud offerings across multiple cloud service providers and cloud types is the key consideration for the  success of the hybrid multi cloud adoption

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Adoption

Hybrid Cloud helps the Organization with increased flexibility to deliver IT resources, improved disaster recovery capabilities and lower IT capital expenses. The other benefits to the Organization are,   

• Business Acceleration: helps in Speed up business processes, support collaboration, and provide cost-effective solutions to free up IT budget for innovative, revenue-generating projects
• Cost Reduction: helps in reducing operating and capital costs and improves performance, productivity and business agility via a flexible, scalable solution. Organizations can choose the applications to move across the clouds  and on premise based on their organization requirements
• Reliability: in this model, if one cloud goes down, some functionality will still be available to users from the other deployed clouds. Generally, one public cloud could be used as backup to another cloud
• Risk Management : helps in mitigating risk with a single, unified, cybersecurity solution
• Manage Legacy Systems : Rather than replacing legacy systems, hybrid Cloud can bridge the gap between legacy and new, providing major cost savings
• Scalability: Applications can scale infinitely through adopting a hybrid multi cloud strategy while keeping the core of the business & data secure through on-premises hosting

Conclusion

Hybrid cloud has become the mainstream of IT as more and more organizations are embracing hybrid cloud as part of IT strategy. Hybrid cloud approach is the key solution for Organizations looking for cloud migration, dynamic workloads, application development acceleration, containerized workloads, Microservices adoption and portability across multiple cloud platforms. 

Hybrid cloud adoption helps the Organization to lower the infrastructure footprint, improves security, increase resilience, zero down time and acceleration in Time to Market. 

Therefore, Hybrid cloud is not just about delivering cost savings. It is about the Organization becoming more agile, efficient and productive. Organizations of any size can adopt Hybrid cloud that helps in cost efficient delivery of the business. 

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Vijayasimha A & Raju Alluri of Wipro Digital Architecture Practice of Wipro Ltd for giving the required time and support in many ways in bringing  up this article. 

Author

Dr.Gopala Krishna Behara is a Distinguished Member and Lead Enterprise Architect in Wipro Technologies with 25+ years of extensive experience in the ICT industry. He serves as an Advisory Architect, Mentor on Enterprise Architecture, Application Modernization and continues to work as a Subject Matter Expert and Author. He is certified in Open Group TOGAF, AWS Solution Architect -Associate, IBM Cloud Solutions and UNPAN. Published number of research papers, books in IT industry. He has been a speaker at National and International forums and bodies like The Open Group, National e-Governance Forum. He has been a moderator and panel member for multiple technical/business forums like IGI Global, AEA, Open Group and Premium College meets. Recipient of EA Hall of Fame International Award – Individual Leadership in EA Practice, Promotion and Professionalization Award. 

He can be reached at: gopalkrishna.behra@wipro.com. 

Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gopalbehara/     

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article/presentation are that of author and Wipro does not subscribe to the substance, veracity or truthfulness of the said opinion