For 2021, the IT cloud and all things connected to it is expected to grow faster than ever before; Forrester Research predicts that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to $120 billion in 2021. With the flexibility of multi-cloud environments, covering private, public, and hybrid clouds; businesses now have the ability to scale up or down their infrastructure needs as required; delivering business critical services at a faster pace, offering ubiquitous, anytime access, and requiring fewer resources to manage.
The biggest challenges businesses currently face is how to migrate legacy applications to the cloud environment while also developing and deploying new applications that tap into the power of new cloud services. At the same time, they have to deal with the current services and IT budget uncertainties from needing to maintain a positive balance sheet.
If you are planning on migrating to or developing new services in the cloud, you need to be aware of – and able to manage – a number of critical service aspects of what we call Hybrid Cloud Provisioning. These include:
- Platform & Service Brokerage
- Hybrid Cloud Service Provisioning
- Service Configuration & Integration
- Controlled Transition to the Cloud
So let’s cover some of the primary features and benefits in a little more detail.
Platform & Service Brokerage
As the name suggests, brokerage is how you integrate and manage work across different hybrid environments. This includes the creation, integration and automation of data workflows across on-premise and cloud technologies, allowing teams to ingest and process data from platforms including SQL, Hadoop, Spark, EMR, Snowflake, RedShift and other data intensive technologies. This is time-consuming to manage on a manual basis and is fraught with potential errors and failures due to the complexity of disparate sources. The focus should be on how you can securely automate data workflows across all on-premise, cloud and containerised environments – true hybrid cloud services.
Hybrid Cloud Service Provisioning
How do you coordinate the deployment and provisioning of applications in hybrid cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure? How do you ensure that services you run up are actively managed, controlled and shut down? We have worked with clients where their cloud service provisioning has resulted in orphan servers, storage and redundant services continuing to run – with the associated costs accruing in an unmanaged and uncontrolled manner. The answer is to integrate and automate the complex infrastructure, application and data workflows across your multi-cloud services with a platform approach across the complete service stack – effectively, giving you a single viewpoint of everything.
Service Configuration & Integration
Part of the benefits of hybrid cloud provision is the ability to automatically run common operating system, database and application maintenance tasks and actions without the need to go to each and every instance of your cloud services. Another benefit is the ability to simplify the workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with AWS and Azure, making them appear to be completely integrated.
Controlled Transition to the Cloud
As you start your transformation journey to the cloud, you need to be able to seamlessly coordinate and integrate legacy applications, operating system activity and web API interactions with those that you are moving to the cloud.
Here at MDB Service Consulting we offer a workflow orchestration solution that integrates across diverse hybrid cloud environments (Amazon Web Services® (AWS), and Microsoft® Azure® with fast and easy provisioning and with native support for popular services such as AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, AWS Batch, Amazon S3, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Batch and more.
To find out more about how our solution will bring tangible and sustainable benefits to your business, get in touch.
Notes:
- Growth in Cloud. https://www.informationweek.com/cloud/looking-at-the-cloud-in-2021-growth-and-changes/a/d-id/1339449?
- Forrester 2021 predictions. https://go.forrester.com/