There has been significant growth in the adoption of cloud services over the past few years as businesses discover the advantages of hosting services and applications on this flexible, efficient, and scalable platform.
However, as many have discovered, the journey to the cloud is not a simple exercise if legacy on-premise services and applications form part of the organization’s enterprise IT environment. Moving on-premise applications and services to the cloud, or integrating these systems with cloud services, requires a comprehensive cloud migration strategy.
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Challenges such as which applications need to be migrated to the cloud, the order in which these applications need to be transferred, and how the on-premise environment will co-exist and communicate with the newly commissioned enterprise cloud environment, need to be overcome. The answer is a hybrid cloud solution which gives you the platform you need to solve these migration challenges.
A hybrid cloud environment uses a mix of on-premise, private cloud and public cloud services to solve the issues which arise when integrating multiple environments. By providing a seamless extension to an on-premise network, hybrid clouds create the networking platform needed to resolve application communication issues which arise during a cloud migration project. However, the true power of a hybrid cloud is the flexibility it can provide to a modern organization.
1. Hybrid Cloud’s flexibility unlocks true business value
Many cloud migration strategies see hybrid clouds as a stepping stone. A transitional phase of a broader migration strategy which will ultimately culminate with all applications and services being moved from an on-premise infrastructure to a hosted cloud environment. However, the reality is the flexibility and cost savings gained by deploying a hybrid cloud far exceed those of a pure cloud deployment model.
These hybrid cloud benefits can only be realized once organizations understand that a hybrid cloud should not merely be seen as an extended network which allows for seamless communication between different environments. A hybrid cloud can be expanded to encompass a multi-platform operational strategy with systems orchestration between various platforms so desired efficiencies and cost savings become a reality.
Orchestration and intelligent workload management
To illustrate these benefits, we need to understand that organizations are dynamic entities. Depending on several factors, the demand for IT resources will differ at distinct points in time. For example, your transactional systems may need excessive processing power at a certain time of the month to create business intelligence dashboards, or your development team may need to commission a testing environment every fortnight before deploying their changes to production.
Hybrid clouds are great for these types of scenarios. They allow organizations to utilize the investment they have made in their existing IT environments by using this infrastructure for daily operational requirements. The public cloud platform can be used when the need arises for additional resource requirements such as increased demand for enterprise computing power and scalability. This flexibility unlocks true business value as organizations are not tied to a single platform. Instead, they can use the ideal platform needed to run a workload efficiently and cost-effectively
2. Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft – Azure’s unique advantage
Microsoft Azure has a unique advantage over other cloud providers when it comes to the deployment and management of a hybrid cloud solution. Since many organizations run Microsoft on-premise infrastructures, Azure has been designed to enable you to extend your on-premise environment and take advantage of the performance and scalability benefits the public cloud has to offer.
There are many Azure services which give you the ability to build hybrid cloud architectures. These include infrastructure-related services such as Site-to-Site VPN networking and ExpressRoute as well as the availability of public API interfaces which exist for other Azure services.
Azure Hybrid Cloud using infrastructure services
A Site-to-Site VPN or ExpressRoute solution lets you extend your on-premise infrastructure into the Azure public cloud. These services allow you to benefit from Azure’s Infrastructure as a Service offering by commissioning virtual machines on Azure which can communicate seamlessly with infrastructure, services, and applications residing on-premise.
To create a hybrid cloud using a Site-to-Site VPN or ExpressRoute, you would first need to commission these services through the Azure Portal. Once this is completed, the next step would be to configure your on-premise perimeter service endpoints with the necessary networking, security, and routing configuration. Although this may seem like a complex undertaking, Azure makes it easy by providing configuration scripts and templates for many popular perimeter endpoint products used by organizations worldwide.
Once the Azure VPN or ExpressRoute Gateway is connected to your on-premise endpoint, sending traffic between the two networks is seamless with the Azure virtual network becoming an extension of your on-premise physical networking infrastructure. With an extended hybrid network in place, you can then commission Azure virtual machines to communicate with services residing on your local network, and they do not need any additional configuration.
3. Azure Hybrid Cloud using an interconnected services model
A hybrid cloud is often considered an infrastructure-related solution which extends an on-premise environment into a public cloud so you can manage the entire environment as a single entity. However, hybrid clouds are not limited to infrastructure only; any online services which seamlessly communicates with your on-premise environment can form part of a hybrid cloud solution. Azure makes this possible through the public APIs available for the majority of its solutions and services.
Building an application in a hybrid cloud world gives you complete flexibility as you can commission on-premise services and complement these with Azure offerings to complete your unique solution. For example, you could build the logic layer and host it on-premise, host the data in an Azure SQL database and then consume Azure Cognitive Services to give your application AI capability. This is just a single example, but the possibilities are endless. A hybrid cloud solution should be seen as a mix of on-premise, private, and public cloud services and should not be limited to the narrow infrastructure definition which is in common use today.
Full integration with Microsoft Azure Stack
Microsoft understands the need for seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud environments, and for this purpose has created Azure Stack. Azure Stack is at its core an extension of Azure created to run hybrid applications on-premise with consistency and efficiency. With Azure Stack, you can address latency and connectivity requirements by processing data locally in Azure Stack on-premise and then aggregating data in Azure for further analytics while sharing common application logic across both platforms. Furthermore, you can update and extend legacy applications with modern Azure services on-premises utilizing the hybrid solution building model discussed earlier.
Hybrid Cloud – Azure has everything you need
The hybrid cloud model is clearly the most flexible approach to cloud computing. By allowing you to take advantage of the benefits of both an on-premise and cloud environment simultaneously, a hybrid cloud provides your business with the options it needs to operate effectively in a dynamic environment.
With Azure and Azure Stack, businesses have all the tools, services, and resources they need to build solutions which are cost-effective, efficient, and scalable. Enterprise integration and automated orchestration allow you to deploy workloads to any environment effortlessly. With your specialized solution using the best platform available, it can perform at its best while ensuring you extract the necessary business value from your hybrid cloud architecture.
