Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud: Cloud Agility to Future-proof your IT Strategy
Most organisations that I meet with and talk to have leadership mandated cloud first strategies that they need to implement and rightly so. There are clear and tangible benefits of consuming cloud services for an organisation. Leveraging cloud platforms and services can allow organisations to reduce their physical footprints, reduce management and administration requirements, reduce environmental complexity, increase productivity and agility and of course, the most important thing, reduce costs. Now this all sounds great, but cloud ecosystems pose some new and very imposing challenges.
Some of the biggest challenges that we come across when talking to organisations is how do we implement our cloud first strategy successfully and how do we implement that strategy in a way that makes sense and applies to our specific business. Also, once we have determined how to approach these strategies, how do we determine the best technology to allow us to implement these strategies effectively. These are all very difficult challenges, but there are ways to make this simpler.
In my opinion, the first place that organisations need to start when trying to address these challenges is to understand what “cloud” means to them. There are many different types of clouds and cloud services from public to private environments that are available and there are a few that apply to some organisations better than others.
Public cloud platforms are all the buzz these days and provide some extremely robust services that almost all organisations should leverage. From Platform-as-a-Service environments such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk, to Software-as-a-Service offerings like Microsoft Office 365 and Infrastructure-as-a-Service environments including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Microsoft Azure. These environments offer flexibility, accessibility, and cost relief that we haven’t been able to leverage in our traditional on-premise world.
Private cloud service providers offer outcome and Service Level Agreement (SLA) driven services and can back their services by controlling and managing not only the infrastructure that the services run on but also the datacentres and network links that drive those solutions as well. These cloud service providers can provide reliable end-to-end services that are completely and entirely managed by a slew of expert engineers and allow an organisation to consume these services how they see fit.
In most instances and for most organisations that I talk to, the nature of your core critical services and applications and how these services are consumed by their users (both internal and external), along with cost considerations, are the key determining factors to what cloud services should be leveraged in their organisations. If your applications and services are web-based and are subject to burst and scale up considerations, then utilising a platform like EC2 or Microsoft Azure might work better. If your applications are static or have been architected for virtual or physical environments, then leveraging private cloud services might make more sense. Also, if there is a push internally to externalise the operational aspects of your IT environment then private cloud could be a fantastic option.
No matter what cloud service options your organisation decides to go with to run their services and applications, choosing the right technology to facilitate that transformation is critical. Leveraging a platform that can help transition your critical applications regardless of hardware platform, operating system (OS), application, virtualisation platform, or cloud environment is critical. Zerto can provide all of the above, all while completely removing the risk involved in performing these transformations. Learn more about achieving resilience through the cloud with Zerto here.
Zerto provides a platform that allows you to mobilise your critical applications, non-disruptively test your applications on the cloud platforms of your choice, seamlessly transition them to the new environments and protect them anywhere you see fit. In an ever-changing IT landscape, where every organisation is looking to modernise their environment by leveraging any and in most cases several cloud services within their organisations, having a solution like Zerto that can make that transition and transformation easy and secure is truly a life saver.
