Hybrid Cloud - Move at Your Own Pace

This is the first in a series of Hybrid Cloud articles where I review what "Cloud" means, discuss it's value, and move on to showing how to actually leverage cloud in your business.  The second blog, Hybrid Cloud - IaaS Foundation Part 1 is available now.

Are you thinking about going to the cloud and worried about having to go all-in and re-engineer your whole IT strategy?  Don't get hung up on the word "cloud" - the cloud is really just another data center - just one run by a company that does it professionally and focuses on doing it at scale and with resources you couldn't hope to match.  Besides... you don't have to go all-in at all.  You can adopt a hybrid approach.

Remember Mr. Miagi from the Karate Kid?  "Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later [makes squish gesture] get squish just like grape." Yeah... the hybrid cloud isn't like that at all.

With the hybrid cloud you get the best of both worlds - on-premises and the cloud.  You leave the workloads and data on-site that can't or don't make sense to move to the cloud and you move the rest.  Oh, and you can do it at your own pace and back out any time you like without penalty.  Did I mention you pay for only what you use and get billed by the minute?

Here's how "cloud" looks in a traditional data center:

You manage everything from the hardware and networking up through the O/S, data and applications.

At the other end of the spectrum you have full cloud computing or Software as a Service (SaaS) where everything is managed by the provider and you just get a web application:

Hybrid cloud isn't just mixing which services are provided by you and the vendor- as you see in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS):

Hybrid actually takes portions of a workload - some data, an application, some infrastructure - and moves just that to the cloud, leaving the rest on-premises.  Here's an example:

In this case, the data is stored in the existing data center but is connected to services in the cloud:

1. Data is stored in your on-premises data center
2. A Windows virtual machine in IaaS in the cloud runs a custom application that connects back to the data center.  (You choose a VM on IaaS instead of PaaS because the custom code requires O/S customization.)  The virtual machine could even integrate data from multiple on-premises and cloud sources.
3. A web application that takes the output from the custom app on the VM is hosted on PaaS (to enable easier scaling and reduce patching and O/S management overhead).
4. The application on PaaS then presents a web interface that is integrated in to your SharePoint Online intranet portal.

I'm not an application architect (though I can hook you up with some good ones!) but there are lots of options to choose from.  The beautiful thing about the cloud is that you can choose the best option for each part of your solution and you don't have to move the whole application to the cloud.

In another example, your Exchange e-mail is on-premises and you want to move just some of your users to the cloud:

In the diagram above, there are some Exchange users in the cloud and some on-premises.  They interact with each other as if they were on the same e-mail system.  You can choose to move just some mailboxes to the cloud or all of them and even move them back if you like.  Perhaps you have some users with e-mail data that contains trade secrets or bank card information... leave them on-premises if you like and just move the general user population to gain efficiency and scale where it makes sense.

The two main things you gain from the cloud are:

1. Scalability
2. Flexibility

And with hybrid cloud you don't have to sacrifice your current IT infrastructure and practices to leverage the cloud's benefits.

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This article is cross posted from my original on LinkedIn Pulse: Hybrid Cloud - Move at Your Own Pace.

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Companies, IT Departments and Workers Need to Get in to the Cloud





cloud computing (Photo credit: kei51)

The cloud is here and businesses that don't change to incorporate it in private, public or some sort of hybrid are in trouble.  They'll be at a terrible disadvantage going forward as their competitors engage resources in the cloud that are unavailable on-premises.

For instance, if your company uses Microsoft software pay attention...  Microsoft originally built their software for on-premises deployment.  The whole suite of Microsoft Office server were local-only apps.  They recently changed to a hybrid software development approach and now many of those apps are being purpose developed specifically as cloud services.  Primary development for Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and the Service Center apps just to name a few are in the cloud.  You'll see features appear there before they appear in the periodic major point releases for on-premises installation.

This means that those businesses that are "in the cloud" will have access to features and capabilities well ahead of those that are not.  It also means that IT workers that only work with on-premises software are going to be woefully unprepared to support the new cloud-based versions.  They simply won't have access to the new software and won't know it.

So, what should companies do?  Get cloud help!  That may mean supplementing their own staff with cloud architects or subcontracting to consultants.  Their existing IT staff simply won't suffice without additional training, however.  Often, existing staff is already taxed and the prospect of coming up to speed on a whole new platform (which it is, by the way) and converting existing business processes is outside of their availability and capability both.

There's a reason why cloud consultants and consulting companies are in such high demand right now.  Similarly to how users demanded smartphones and tablets, executives and users are demanding the capabilities of cloud computing now.  They'll try it in small ways like e-mail and instant messaging and cloud services will eventually penetrate organizations from the top down and bottom up.  IT departments that have not prepared and IT workers that are untrained will be caught in the middle, being asked to do something they have no experience with.  At that point their choices are to outsource, train up, or fall behind.

Cloud services do indeed represent a sea change in IT services.  However, cloud is no panacea.  Most services are still better handled in house, but the list is continually shrinking.  I was once a Microsoft Exchange consultant... a fairly highly sought after skill.  I certainly wouldn't consider that my most marketable skill any more, though.  E-mail consultants without cloud skills are like cars with engines that need leaded gasoline or Betamax tapes... they've had their time and now its time to enter the 21st century.

Many other disciplines are experiencing similar changes.  Developers and infrastructure workers alike will need to update skills if they have not already.  Companies are demanding they do so and going in to denial won't save your job when your company decides to outsource e-mail management or web development.  It's better to be part of the change and help direct how cloud services are implemented than to have them forced on you.

So, get in to the cloud or get left behind, change waits for noone.

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