3 steps to help organizations seamlessly transition to the cloud

HYBRID cloud refers to an IT infrastructure where data storage and computing could be distributed between on-premise systems and off-premise cloud servers.

This approach has been gaining a considerable amount of traction among forwarding thinking businesses because it is agile and cost-effectiveness.

However, there is simply no one-size-fits-all solution at the moment, given the various application service level agreements (SLAs).

Organizations cannot afford to isolate data and workloads any longer and need the ability to migrate based on business needs.

As businesses rightfully recognize that hybrid infrastructure is the future, they are also aware that transitioning to it is not as straightforward. Fortunately, there are steps that IT teams could take to simplify this:

Step #1: Select a few services to leverage first

As an initial step towards simplifying the hybrid cloud journey, companies must pick a few services they can leverage, to begin with.

There are many cloud services providers in the market offerings unique functions and features such as APIs and authentication methods, among others, with their varying business models and pricing.

This market saturation, while presenting businesses with many options, also created a learning curve, not unlike picking an on-premise provider.

So, instead of shifting mission-critical business applications which need to run continuously, IT teams could start by migrating ancillary workloads. The functions they could move first could include backup, disaster recovery, and monitoring.

Step #2: Look for compatibility

The second step towards seamlessly transitioning to a hybrid cloud environment is to seek compatibility between the on-premise infrastructure and the public cloud services.

One of the core objectives of hybrid cloud infrastructure is its ability to migrate applications from on-premise to the cloud, for instance, in the event of a disaster or if more compute cycle is needed for an application due to increase in demand.

As such, software compatibility specifically at the hypervisor level lays the foundation toward a successful hybrid cloud deployment.

Step #3: Consolidate workloads on hyper-converged infrastructure

Lastly, IT teams must consolidate their on-premise infrastructure as much as they can.

One way to achieve that is via the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) pathway whereby companies could just simply add a node, expand, and scale the system.

However, the majority of HCI topologies are designed to be deployed on general purpose hardware, which could be a cause for concern in the long run.

To consolidate multiple workforces on HCI systems, companies must ensure that their hardware infrastructure is scalable as well.

That way, the problems of node and virtual machine sprawl could be avoided, while optimizing hardware utilization, to improve cost efficiency.

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