Hybrid/Multi-Cloud: the ultimate handbook to select, secure and optimize your cloud strategy
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies are an important and growing trend. As you explore your options, here’s a complete guide to help you understand all the options and benefits, choose the right cloud strategy and solution for your business, manage cloud security and compliance, and optimize cloud performance.
Understanding Hybrid/Multi-Cloud – And Choosing the Right Strategy for Your Business
Whether you choose a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, the benefits are similar.
Both offer the ability to:
Save money on cloud expenses
Improve scalability
Better leverage the benefits of the cloud to complete projects and achieve business goals
But which strategy is right for you? Your company’s strategic objective, business requirements, cloud maturity, and specific use cases will determine the best strategy to adopt.
To determine the best fit, ask yourself these questions:
Is my current infrastructure supporting or hindering my business?
What is my solution's current performance, availability, and resiliency?
Do I need to modernize the application portfolio?
Should I move workloads to the cloud? Which ones?
A simple way to identify which strategy to use is to evaluate your cloud maturity. If this is your first attempt, we recommend a hybrid cloud strategy, where you control most of your workflows within your on-premise implementation.
On the other hand, if you have experience with clouds and you want to finish migrating your workflows to a cloud, then a multi-cloud strategy is a great way to reinforce availability and workload distribution. It is not recommended to use to multi-cloud strategy on your first cloud adoption project.
What is Multi-Cloud?
Multi-cloud means using multiple cloud computing services from various public vendors within a heterogeneous architecture.
This approach enhances cloud infrastructure capabilities by cherry-picking services from many providers that solve your infrastructure requirements and optimize costs. A typical multi-cloud architecture, where two or more public clouds and multiple private clouds are used, aims to eliminate reliance on any single cloud provider, thereby alleviating vendor lock-in.
It is common for enterprises to opt for multiple cloud providers to cater to varying service needs, including infrastructure, platform, software, and container services. Depending on the enterprise's preferences and requirements, deploying a single workload across various providers or having a backup on a different provider is possible, avoiding vendor lock.
What is Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud combines the benefits of public and on-premise environments. It's a powerful tool that connects collocation, managed, or dedicated services with cloud resources. With this approach, you can take advantage of multiple deployment models and achieve your business goals faster and more efficiently.
A hybrid cloud service is a versatile option that goes beyond the limitations of private infrastructure (on-prem) and public services by crossing isolation and provider boundaries. This empowers organizations to enhance their cloud service capacity and capability by integrating, customizing, and aggregating with another service.
A good example is a company that may keep confidential customer information on a private cloud application and then connects it with a public cloud-based business intelligence application. This hybrid cloud model allows the organization to offer a more specialized service by incorporating public cloud services that are available externally.
Note: A multi-cloud strategy does not contain a hybrid cloud, but a hybrid cloud might contain a multi-cloud strategy.
Unlocking the Benefits: Hybrid/Multi-Cloud for Businesses
Here’s a simple way to compare the benefits of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
| Hybrid Cloud | Multi-Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Flexibility | Select the most suitable cloud environment for each workload, increase or decrease resources as needed | Select the most suitable cloud environment for each workload, increase or decrease resources as needed, include specific services from multiple cloud providers based on needs and budget |
| Scalability | Only scale the resources on the cloud quickly | Scale infrastructure up or down seamlessly and without substantial investments in additional hardware |
| Cost Optimization | Optimize costs by reducing on-premises infrastructure and transferring workload to a public cloud that would be too expensive to scale in their current infrastructure | Exploit diverse pricing models and execute cost-effective decisions by cherry-picking services from multiple providers that accurately match their requirements |
| Enhanced Disaster Recovery | Enhance their disaster recovery capabilities, ensure uninterrupted business continuity, increase resilience by replicating data and applications across multiple cloud environments | Enhance their disaster recovery capabilities, ensure uninterrupted business continuity, increase resilience by replicating data and applications across multiple cloud environments |
| Personalization | Right size solution with the exact service and size you need from each vendor, choose the exact best fit for you now with the freedom to expand in the future | |
| Innovation | Take advantage of new and emerging features from each cloud provider as they emerge | |
| Freedom from Vendor Lock | Avoid performance issues, limited options, or unnecessary costs from using a single cloud vendor |
Tips for Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Security and Compliance
One of the biggest challenges of hybrid/multi-cloud adoption is ensuring security and compliance across multiple cloud environments.
Common Challenges:
Data protection: With data spread across multiple cloud environments, ensuring consistent data protection and encryption can be challenging. While cloud providers offer tools that are easy to use and designed to keep data safe in the cloud, it’s important to know that cloud security is a shared model. This means that data protection is not just the cloud providers' responsibility but also the end user's commitment to ensuring data protection.
Access management: Dealing with access to applications and data on various cloud platforms can be complicated, especially when each provider has its own access management approaches. To simplify things, we recommend implementing centralized identity management or single sign-on strategies. These methods will help streamline configurations and maintenance for each cloud's Role Based Access Control (RBAC).
Staff Skillset: To ensure successful implementation, having a capable team is important. Simply selecting the right cloud providers and services isn't enough. It's unlikely that your engineers will know all the technical specifications for each provider, which can cause stress during implementation. The options here are to train and certify your team in the necessary cloud services, or to engage a managed service provider to fill gaps in your team's capabilities without excessively increasing maintenance costs.
Best Practices for Securing Hybrid or Multi-Cloud Environment
Each cloud provider has their own unique approach to integrating their products and services, which can make it difficult to secure them all. As a result, businesses must implement solutions that work across multiple clouds and environments to ensure that their data and applications are secure and compliant with regulations.
For compliance, it is necessary to implement a well-architected framework, which is a fundamental requirement for every cloud provider. This framework should be reviewed with a focus on security, ensuring that users, roles, and network rules are granted the minimum privileges necessary.
With a hybrid cloud, the biggest security risk is the connectivity between on-premise and your cloud provider; securing ports and encryption is key to safeguarding your data from theft and applications from security breaches.
With a multi-cloud, the best recommendations are the same no matter how many cloud providers you have: create Virtual Private Cloud and Virtual Private Network, maintain and update your access management list, and rotate credentials.
To maintain security over time, we recommend that you:
Conduct regular security assessments: identify vulnerabilities and risks in the hybrid or multi-cloud environment
Implement a security monitoring solution: detect and respond to security threats in real-time
Implement a disaster recovery plan: ensure business continuity during a security breach or other disaster
Train employees on security best practices: educate employees to reduce the risk of a security breach
Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Optimization
Optimizing a hybrid or multi-cloud environment can help businesses reduce costs and improve performance. Here are some recommended strategies:
Hybrid Cloud Optimization
Right-size hybrid cloud workloads:
Ensuring that workloads are adequately sized for their environment can help reduce costs and improve performance. Rightsizing is a systematic approach, and hybrid cloud migration is a chance to evaluate computing and storage practices across the company. You will often discover fragmented workloads, duplications, new workloads, and aged-out products through your data centers.
Evaluate performance:
When selecting a cloud service provider, it's important to consider the type of workload you'll be using and whether the provider's infrastructure is optimal for it. Providers now specialize in specific workloads, such as helping developers or supporting applications like Job Functions, Lambdas, containers, and database-managed services. Another crucial factor is latency, especially in hybrid cloud environments where on-premises workloads must communicate with cloud infrastructure. In such cases, choosing a provider with a local edge data center or one that can facilitate direct connectivity options is critical.
Match public and private infrastructure:
You must select a hybrid cloud provider who can fully support the technology options you currently utilize in your on-premises infrastructure. This effort ensures that simple mappings between your virtual machine choices and the provider's supported formats are available. By aligning these two infrastructures, you will facilitate the seamless migration of workloads.
Weigh-out pricing:
When implementing cloud services, pricing plays a crucial role. To prevent unexpected costs, monitoring resource usage and confirming fees with providers is important. Planning for potential extraction costs when terminating a contract is also important. Carefully selecting a hybrid cloud provider and establishing a reliable long-term strategy is essential.
Multi-Cloud Optimization
Use reserved instances:
Save money on cloud costs by committing to a certain amount of usage. This option is a good fit when you plan utilization for one year or more. So, as you analyze your workload, including all the requirements, you can determine which reserved instances and which cloud provider to use.
Optimizing both Hybrid and Multi-Cloud:
Automation:
Automation can be advantageous when managing a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. Automating tasks such as provisioning and scaling can significantly reduce time and costs. This approach also enables flexible resource allocation, allowing you to increase or decrease resources as required. Automated tasks make it effortless to scale up or down resources, ensuring efficient environment management.
In some cases, these automations can be taken a step further by standardizing the use of some 3rd party solutions. For example, instead of using the native toolkits for each provider, Cloud Formation for AWS vs PowerShell for Azure, your organization can adopt the use of Terraform which can be used across multiple cloud platforms.
Monitor and optimize costs:
Automate the resource allocation per workload, identify the correct size and possibly migrate to reserved instances, correct the flow of resources per workload, and automate onboarding new workloads to a standardized pipeline.
Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Management
Cloud management refers to the day-to-day administration of an IT environment. A hybrid solution must have a public cloud, so you manage at least one cloud and one on-prem infrastructure.
Multi-cloud management refers to the day-to-day administration of an IT environment that utilizes two or more cloud offerings from different providers. This type of management involves employing various tools and strategies to handle the complexities, risks, and potential inefficiencies associated with multi-cloud deployment.
The main objectives of multi-cloud management are to centralize the administration of all clouds and their distinct features, ideally through a single graphical user interface. IBM Cloud Pak for Multi-cloud Management is an example of a hybrid cloud platform that offers this feature and supports multiple cloud providers.
Another option is Hypergrid, which provides multi-cloud platform management for enterprises, including security, cost management, predictive analytics, access control, and self-service provisioning while ensuring that all platforms adhere to consistent rules for user authentication, workload migrations, security measures, performance benchmarks, and so on.
This approach also aims to increase visibility and control over all cloud-based assets, speed up self-service and overall delivery, reduce the number of manual tasks involved with deploying and moving software, monitor applications across all platforms, help the team identify optimal services for workloads, take advantage of each provider's best features, analyze and compare expenses across all cloud providers, and track cloud service usage and governance.
Choosing the Right Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Solution
The success of your implementation depends on this decision, which is why it is crucial to get it right from the start.
Factors to Consider
Hybrid Cloud:
Compatibility: The solution should be compatible with the existing IT infrastructure and applications. Remember that the cloud is a great solution but may be incompatible with older operating systems or deprecated applications. The good news is that cloud providers offer tools to make migration easy, verifying compatibility with all on-premises resources. These tools analyze whether applications, virtual servers, operating systems, and drivers can migrate to a cloud environment.
Cost-effectiveness: Consider utilizing private clouds for your business. They provide cost-effective solutions by allowing you to customize your cloud services to balance performance and costs. Furthermore, private clouds provide you with increased control over where you allocate your resources, which is crucial for any business. Keep in mind that growing and scaling your on-prem infrastructure can be expensive. However, with private clouds, you can control your spending by adjusting variables such as forecasting, utilization, performance requirements, high availability, regions, and volume. It's imperative to find the right balance to create a cost-effective implementation.
Multi-Cloud:
Flexibility: The solution needs to be versatile and accommodate various cloud environments while allowing customization. Cloud environments are highly adaptable. You can mix and match resources from different providers, even within a hybrid cloud. This flexibility is beneficial when discovering the best solution, as it empowers you to design anything from a basic to a complex infrastructure.
Scalability: When exploring scalability, it is crucial to evaluate the purpose and needs of your application, define the issue you intend to address and identify the required infrastructure. To determine this, consider questions such as: Is my application exposed to a surge in traffic during peak hours or holidays? Do I possess enough capacity to allocate workloads evenly across my platform? These answers disclose non-functional demands that your hybrid/multi-cloud strategy must incorporate.
Considerations for both Hybrid and Multi-Cloud:
Security: Cloud security is a shared responsibility with your cloud provider; it is about the tools securing your infrastructure and apps and your culture towards security. All cloud providers offer standard security levels and options like web application firewalls, security groups, and network access control lists. You can also add tools from other security providers if you need specialized security. Cloud providers are flexible and have many security features and integrations for you to choose and configure to your needs.
Tips for Selecting the Right Solution
To choose wisely, follow these tips:
Evaluate your needs: Assess your business needs and identify the features and capabilities that are most important to your business.
Research vendors: Research and compare their offerings to determine which solution best fits your business. Use their free tools and services to evaluate the value that each brings to the table.
Consider support: Consider the level of support that the vendor provides, including training, documentation, and customer support. Each cloud provider offers different partnerships and support plans. We recommend listing the support requirements as part of the selection.
Whatever you decide, don’t rush it: You should never just take a "lift & shift" approach. Assess each workload and application individually and have a holistic migration strategy.
The Bottom Line
Deciding between hybrid and multi-cloud is a matter of understanding your needs, running an assessment of your organization, identifying the gaps within your infrastructure and what your digital products can do, and evaluating what can be improved with a cloud service.
If the answer is that all of your services will live happier in the cloud (without breaking the bank) then move them all and consider multi-cloud to balance the workload and avoid vendor lock. However, if you identify services and digital products that must live within your premises, the answer is simple - a hybrid cloud is for you.
