Set Up a Hybrid Cloud Environment: Key Considerations
A hybrid cloud approach integrates multiple services and architectures across private and public cloud systems and even on-premises infrastructure, allowing organizations to take advantage of the benefits of each solution while maintaining control over sensitive data and applications. However, while this approach offers significant benefits, including increased performance, scalability, security and flexibility, implementation can be challenging.
The success of a hybrid cloud approach relies on tailored implementations harnessing the strengths of each system while effectively addressing their respective limitations. Each implementation should be unique to your organization’s objectives, existing infrastructure and projected workload or labor requirements for your environment. Disregarding your business’s unique needs and infrastructure can lead to unnecessary costs and reduced efficiency.
If you’re considering setting up a hybrid cloud environment, here are several factors you need to consider including assessing organizational needs, choosing a unified control plane and addressing compliance considerations to make informed decisions and implement best practices.
Understand Your Organization’s Needs
Hybrid cloud environments give you a lot of flexibility to tailor solutions to your business and infrastructure. But before you set up your environment, you need to assess your organization’s needs and requirements.
What Are Your Resource Requirements?
Your computing infrastructure needs will determine the type of resources you require and how your environment will be structured. Conduct a thorough analysis of your workloads to understand their performance, storage and networking requirements. Identify which workloads are sensitive to latency, require high throughput or demand significant computational power.
For instance, a video streaming service will require a different level of computing and storage resources than a messaging application, primarily because of the substantial data requirements for storing and streaming video files. An internal solution at the central location of your company will need less networking power than a social media platform that should be performant globally.
Streaming services and platforms that deliver content around the world are ideal use cases for hybrid cloud environments, as they provide easy scalability and network delivery. For example, TELUS Stream+ uses both Google Cloud services and on-premises technology to improve streaming performance, lower delivery costs and increase scaling flexibility. New cloud resources can be built and positioned to meet rising demand in real time, augmenting on-premises infrastructure.
Which Standards and Regulations Apply?
Your hybrid cloud setup needs to comply with security, privacy and data standards. For example, there are general regulations, such as the GDPR, as well as industry-specific regulations that often deal with sensitive data, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS and FERPA. These compliance requirements demand that strict measures be taken to ensure sensitive data is protected and, in the case of data residency laws, is not transported across country borders.
Before setting up your hybrid cloud environment, you need to be familiar with all the regulations you must comply with so that you can effectively incorporate them into your setup. Beyond identifying the relevant regulations for your industry, make sure you consult with legal and compliance experts and monitor for regulatory changes.
Sensitive data should be filtered out and kept secure on-premises or on private cloud platforms. You should also take care when processing data to maintain privacy and data sovereignty. The ability to maintain a mix of private, public cloud and on-premises resources allows healthcare organizations and financial firms to have on-demand cloud scalability while maintaining infrastructure standards.
What Types of Workloads Will Be Included in Your Hybrid Cloud Setup?
Certain operations and workloads within your organization, such as critical or sensitive data-processing tasks, require the enhanced security and compliance provided by on-premises or private cloud infrastructure. However, other workloads, such as web applications and services that require global availability, benefit from the easy connectivity and accessibility offered by public cloud deployments.
To make your hybrid environment as efficient as possible, you need to identify the different operations and use cases you need your hybrid cloud environment to support, then assign your cloud and on-premises resources as needed. Classify your workloads based on their importance. For example, mission-critical workloads with high availability, reliability and performance should be prioritized. Evaluate the costs of executing on each platform and explore the performance and efficiency benefits or drawbacks.
With a hybrid cloud environment, you don’t need to limit data workloads to monolithic data warehouses or move your entire operations to the cloud. Data analytics firms and data-focused organizations use this flexibility to move workloads between the cloud and on-premises based on performance, cost and efficiency.
Choosing Cloud Providers for a Hybrid Cloud Environment
Your choice of cloud provider is significant in shaping your hybrid environment. Each provider offers different features and integrations that can influence your environment. If you’re in the process of picking a cloud provider for your hybrid cloud setup, there are several factors to consider.
Data Center Locations
While many major cloud providers have data centers distributed across multiple regions worldwide, the scope and coverage of their global infrastructures vary. Make sure you explore your cloud provider’s coverage for your region of interest.
The distance between your users, organizational data and cloud data centers can lead to increased latency, reduced performance and higher data transfer costs that compound during peak traffic periods. Your data center locations also affect data sovereignty standards and compliance requirements, as certain jurisdictions require companies to store and process data within the country’s borders.
Service Compatibility
Before choosing a cloud provider, you need to consider your existing infrastructure and its compatibility with any potential cloud provider. Choosing a cloud provider that matches your existing service architecture simplifies integration, management and resource use while maintaining interoperability within your infrastructure.
If there’s a specific cloud platform with effective integrations with your tools and services, or if your applications already run on a specific provider’s cloud resources, the ideal scenario would be to use that cloud provider. An organization that uses on-premises Oracle databases would likely have a strong compatibility preference for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Vendor Lock-In
Cloud resources are designed to offer flexibility, but a hybrid cloud environment should ideally provide even more options. Unfortunately, as your infrastructure expands, you may encounter challenges in terms of cost and complexity when attempting to refactor or migrate services, potentially resulting in vendor lock-in.
Before choosing a cloud provider, you need to explore possible exit strategies and look closely at the fine print in offerings like AWS’s or Google Cloud’s free egress when leaving their cloud platforms, exploring their contractual and legal terms, interoperability and compatibility with other cloud providers and technical support. Make sure you can migrate your scaled-up infrastructure if and when business and organizational needs shift.
Business and Competitive Landscape
Given the interconnected nature of tech companies and cloud providers, major cloud players like Microsoft, Amazon and Google offer and invest in a wide array of products across various domains that could be direct competitors to your business. Your smaller business could run into a problem if your software product could be packaged as a cloud service by a hyper-scaler in the future. Consequently, the decision of which cloud provider to use can be influenced by the domains and product offerings that are attached. You might want to avoid paying a competitor, current or potential to host a substantial portion of your software infrastructure.
Examples in the world of megabusinesses include Walmart, which has taken steps to avoid using the cloud services of its retail competitor, Amazon. These steps include building in-house cloud solutions that reduce its dependency on external companies and, when necessary, using hybrid cloud deployments with services from other cloud providers (including Microsoft and Google). Target, another huge Amazon rival, has taken a similar approach.
Cloud Resources and Services Costs
Cost is always a crucial factor in choosing any service or tool, but it’s specifically relevant when choosing a cloud provider, with cloud services offering different pricing models and hidden costs for data transfers, support and service locations.
There are some cost optimization strategies for setting up and managing your hybrid cloud environment. A common and effective method involves adopting a workload-centric approach. For this method, you evaluate your individual workload needs and explore the most economical deployment choice with each cloud provider. You can investigate which of your public, private cloud or on-premises options are more effective regarding variables such as cost, scalability and performance.
Once you’ve implemented your preferred cost optimization strategies, you can apply workload optimization to help cut additional costs while maintaining optimal performance.
Available Storage Options
A cloud provider’s storage packages are another factor you should consider, as they help manage your organization’s data across your hybrid environment. There are three different storage options you can consider, all with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Public cloud storage offers a straightforward scalability, management and networking process, which makes it ideal for dynamic workloads. However, extra caution is necessary to ensure security when storing and transporting data in a public cloud. You also need to consider incurred egress costs, even with the pay-as-you-go pricing model. Public cloud storage is a flexible and scalable storage option, offering broad accessibility that’s beneficial for your workloads.
Private cloud storage offers a more restricted and controlled option for sensitive data, with enhanced control over access permissions and security measures. However, relative to public cloud options, it requires more expertise to manage and has a higher upfront cost. Private cloud storage is ideal for workloads that require the increased scale of the cloud but need enhanced security and compliance for any sensitive data.
On-premises storage is often the most costly option (depending on your needs and setup) due to the upfront cost for physical space and hardware, as well as ongoing maintenance costs. These costs can compound with your scaling efforts. But, for highly regulated sectors, your on-premises storage can ensure higher performance and guaranteed data sovereignty compliance depending on your data residency requirements. On-premises storage is best for maximum control and performance, especially when regulatory or latency considerations are critical.
Aside from these three major options, you can also consider cloud adjacent storage, multicloud storage and hybrid cloud storage services, which augment and extend storage within your hybrid cloud environment. Cloud-adjacent storage is managed storage offered as a service in colocation data centers where it can be connected directly and privately to public cloud platforms. This option offers lower latency, higher security and much lower egress costs than traditional cloud storage. Multicloud storage provides more flexibility and reduces vendor lock-in, but you’re faced with more complexity when integrating and managing multiple cloud provider resources. Lastly, hybrid cloud storage can help you balance the performance benefits of on-premises storage and the scalability benefits of cloud storage.
Networking Performance
Communication is essential in your hybrid cloud environment, as each component within the cloud and on-premises infrastructure needs to receive and send data messages for effective operations. Downtime or network disruptions can delay synchronization within your environment and cause data loss.
Make sure that you prioritize cloud providers who have a track record of network reliability within your operational regions and with your given workloads. Explore bandwidth and latency metrics for your cloud provider options, looking into their ability to provide high-bandwidth and low-latency data transmission at scale. Your network performance will affect data transfer within your hybrid cloud environment. Efficient networking ensures fast data synchronization across clouds.
Using a Unified Control Plane
Once you understand your organizational needs and determine the cloud providers that can help you achieve your goals, your next consideration should be management and maintenance. Having an overarching framework that governs the management and orchestration of resources across your hybrid cloud environment is important, and using a unified control plane is one of the best ways to achieve this.
Unified control planes can be implemented in different ways, depending on your infrastructure and hybrid cloud environment. However, a unified control plane’s main feature is its ability to explore, deploy and maintain your resources across the components of your hybrid cloud environment. This involves connecting with each component, gathering information to build a holistic perspective and gaining access to take automated actions across components.
Automation is necessary within your hybrid cloud environment because manual intervention in each contained component is inefficient for maintaining operations. With automation, you can dynamically allocate compute, storage and networking resources at scale based on workload demands. You can automate the application of security and compliance measures, as well as carry out data quality and synchronization processes from your control plane, minimizing the risk of inconsistencies within your environment and enhancing data integrity.
The ability to access and execute operations across your hybrid environment enables you to efficiently deal with the complexities of a hybrid cloud setup, such as managing and orchestrating tasks and deploying and observing software resources. There are cloud provider platforms (such as Microsoft Azure Arc and Anthos Multi-Cloud API) that connect across cloud vendor resources and hybrid-cloud-focused management platforms (such as VMware Cloud Foundation) that can automate and manage resources across public and private cloud environments. Both of these options offer a simplified interface to create and manage your resources.
Apart from these options, you can use tools like Crossplane, which offers a centralized control plane for orchestrating both applications and infrastructure across your hybrid environment. It’s built for Kubernetes orchestration, and you can use Crossplane to extend your created components to connect with different clouds and manage your cloud and compute resources. Crossplane enables the automation of jobs and tasks, allowing you to provision your resources across platforms as needed using templates. With better visibility of your resources across cloud providers and environments, you can integrate your services, maintain data synchronization and abstract workload management and security enforcement, reducing the complexity of monitoring multiple services and platforms.
You can also build your own custom abstraction layer using APIs to create a unified control plane that is built for your organizational needs. However, unless your cloud needs are very simple, building your own control plane would be very difficult and require significant expertise.
You can create custom automation scripts or use Infrastructure as Code tools such as Red Hat Ansible and Terraform to provision and manage resources across hybrid cloud environments.
Conclusion
A hybrid cloud environment offers many benefits, including the flexibility to scale and migrate resources to suit your needs while maintaining the security of your sensitive data and applications and adhering to compliance and regulatory requirements.
As you work through the process of setting up your hybrid cloud environment, you’ll be introduced to new challenges, including differing regulations, such as data privacy and data sovereignty laws, across regions that you might deploy to. In addition, integrating and managing your wide range of cloud services and platforms without significant cloud sprawl and shadow IT is crucial. It’s also important to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure you can migrate services freely across clouds without conflicting technologies. Thankfully, there are tools available that can help you handle these challenges and efficiently manage your hybrid cloud setup.
Equnix’s dedicated cloud services bring the on-demand, API-driven cloud experience to deploying and managing global hybrid cloud environments. It enables you to connect fully managed dedicated compute and storage infrastructure provisioned directly to all major public clouds, backhaul networks, ISPs and enterprise customers. It gives you full control over your hybrid cloud architecture and how packets travel on your network.
