Pythian Blog: Technical Track

How to avoid 5 common mistakes in hybrid cloud implementations

by Pythian Marketing on Sep 6, 2018 12:00:00 AM

Hybrid cloud solutions are growing in popularity and for good reason. They have the potential to bring significant cost savings, agility, flexibility and scalability to the modern enterprise. But the key word here is “potential” because missteps in planning and implementation will increase the time it takes to realize the benefits of hybrid cloud computing. In this, the third and final post in this blog series, we’re looking at some of the most common mistakes in hybrid cloud implementation. Mistake #1: moving too fast. Building and implementing the right hybrid cloud architecture is a complex process, and not one to be rushed. A successful hybrid cloud depends on a well-designed network. The right architecture allows you to begin with a small environment that you can add to as you go. Make low latency and security your priorities when connecting your private and public clouds. And be sure you have a plan for disaster recovery. On top of all its other benefits, the public cloud minimizes both the disruption to your business and the costs of disaster recovery. Mistake #2: taking security for granted. Your cloud service provider manages the overall security of the cloud environment, but significant responsibility still rests with you as the client within that environment. It will be up to your organization to manage all your customer data, operating systems, updates, networks, security, encryption and more. Addressing these responsibilities will require personnel with specialized skills, skills that you might not have needed in the past. Mistake #3: not planning for compatibility issues. Applications that have served you well in the past won’t necessarily be compatible with the cloud. Cloud infrastructure is set up in ways that are fundamentally different from the infrastructure and software stacks found in data centers, and your existing applications will have to be adapted to the new environment. As an alternative, you might consider modernizing your applications by moving to microservices and creating new apps that are cloud-native. Mistake #4: not monitoring spending. The old data center model involved capital expenses that were paid up front. In hybrid cloud computing, your costs become operational expenses. You are billed regularly, and only for the resources you use. The downside, though, is that your spending can vary wildly from one month to the next. Therefore, it is crucial to monitor how cost-effectively your cloud service is being used. If you’re using the wrong instance type for the job, or leaving running instances idle, or storing data improperly, you are wasting money. Tools are available to monitor usage and alert you before you exceed your cloud budget. You’ll also want to consider the discounted hourly rates for reserved instances and cold data storage. Mistake #5: being too vendor-loyal. Don’t be afraid to use cloud-native services in moving your database to a hybrid cloud. Services such as Amazon Web Services' Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) will save you the time-consuming burden of manually installing and backing up your data. And if you use Hadoop clusters in your data center, consider a managed Hadoop framework that will allow you to run popular distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, Presto or Flink. There are countless success stories in hybrid cloud computing, but there are also some cautionary tales. If you’re about to make a hybrid cloud part of your enterprise strategy, make sure you have a plan that will work. In the meantime, learn how Pythian can help make your hybrid cloud a success. Saying “yes” to the hybrid cloud Other posts in this series: Part 1: What is the hybrid cloud and what are its benefits? Part 2: Top 5 considerations for a hybrid cloud environment

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