What You Need to Know About Hybrid Cloud: It’s all ’bout that base

Long, long, long ago, we all took Chemistry. One of my absolutely favorite parts of chemistry was the lab — getting liquids and gases to change colors. And seeing the pH scale in action.

The pH scale measures how acidic or basic a substance is. It ranges from 0 to 14. A pH less than 7 is acidic, and a pH greater than 7 is basic. (Side: If you are not enjoying this analogy, think politics and the political spectrum and where someone may stand on say, immigration.)

We have a similar scale or spectrum in IT — namely, Hybrid.

Hybrid runs from traditional legacy IT on premise all the way to complete adoption of everything in a public cloud off premise. And anywhere in between.

The reality is that neither extreme makes a lot of sense – what we want to do is optimize so that we get the best of all worlds in a sort of hybrid existence. We need to study our applications and functional and non-functional requirements to determine the best fit for our workloads. Hey, is this sounding like the old Fit for Purpose type methodology ? You bet — it’s just a key added dimension for these new environments.

There are 7 decision focus areas that may help us work out how best to optimize where our applications and IT organizations fall on the Hybrid spectrum. Let’s look at each:

• 1. The Private/Public/Hybrid Cloud decision for workloads based on requirements – Research by workload a best fit based on RAS, performance, pricing, etc.
• 2. Keep your Systems of Record on the private side of the enterprise boundary (which may have financial or secure data) and your more mobile and social Systems of Engagement on the public side.  And connect them.
• 3. Design and implement certain workloads to be Portable, to be able to go to and from a private environment to a public environment for optimization.
• 4. Employ Systems Management as a key differentiator. Plan management capabilities across multiple environments.
• 5. Consider off premise Backup and Archive.
• 6. With certain workload peaks you may want to take advantage of public cloud for large jobs as an Additional Resource – maybe for extreme Hadoop implementations, as an example.
• 7. Disaster Recovery – plan a parallel environment off premise.

By examining these considerations, you can make decisions for your organization to optimize where entire applications or parts of applications should reside. And place yourself on the Hybrid spectrum. In some cases, lemon juice might be best, sometimes baking soda. It’s just another awesome way we can tune our workloads to perform in the best way possible.

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