As cloud adoption continues to mature, organizations are finding themselves navigating an increasingly complex journey to the cloud. The hybrid and multicloud scenario presents both challenges and opportunities, requiring a strategic and well-orchestrated approach to succeed.

This comprehensive guide will walk you through the key considerations and guidance necessary to prepare for and thrive in a hybrid and multicloud environment.

The Hybrid and Multicloud Scenario

The hybrid and multicloud scenario is centered around two primary goals:

  1. Hybrid and Multicloud Adoption: Enabling the deployment and migration of solutions that are portable, allowing for seamless movement between cloud platforms with minimal vendor lock-in.

  2. Unified Operations: Streamlining operations to support these solutions across each cloud, through a central set of governance and management processes that share common operations, regardless of the current deployment location.

Scenario Components

To deliver on this end-to-end customer journey, several key guidance sets are required:

  1. Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure: These articles walk through the essential considerations and implementations of the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) methodology. Use this guidance to prepare decision-makers, central IT, and the cloud center of excellence (CCoE) for the adoption of hybrid and multicloud workloads across your portfolio.

  2. Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework: These articles outline the critical considerations that workload owners should make when deploying their solutions across hybrid and multicloud environments.

  3. Reference Architectures: These pre-built reference solutions can help accelerate the deployment of common hybrid and multicloud scenarios.

  4. Best Practices: Level 300+ articles that assist central IT teams in onboarding assets to a unified operations solution using Azure Arc, ARM templates, and other relevant Azure products.

  5. Featured Azure Products: Learn about the Azure products that can support your hybrid and multicloud strategy.

  6. Learning Modules: Gain the hands-on skills required to implement, maintain, and support hybrid and multicloud solutions.

As organizations embark on their hybrid and multicloud journey, they often encounter several key challenges. Let’s explore the guidance available to address these:

Preparing for Centralized Operations: Review the Cloud Adoption Framework articles to establish the processes and approaches required to support a portfolio of workloads across hybrid and multicloud environments.

Monitoring Assets Across Hybrid and Multicloud: Focus on the unified operations, governance, and management articles to integrate a centralized operations solution into your existing processes. Use the “ready” article to deploy these improvements across all of your cloud environments.

Influencing Changes to Individual Workloads (Central IT): As hybrid and multicloud controls improve, central IT teams will need to understand the architecture behind individual workloads. Leverage the Azure Well-Architected Framework guidance to help workload owners optimize their solutions for hybrid and multicloud operations.

Optimizing Individual Workloads (Workload Teams): Workload owners should start with the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review to understand the best ways to integrate hybrid and multicloud strategies into their workloads. This guidance can also provide insights into best practices and architectures that the central IT team is responsible for delivering.

Onboarding Individual Assets: Use the best practices section to execute a series of processes to onboard all of your hybrid assets.

Implementing Specific Azure Products: Accelerate and improve your hybrid and multicloud capabilities using the Azure products outlined in the featured products section.

By leveraging the guidance and resources outlined in this comprehensive guide, your organization can navigate the hybrid and multicloud landscape with confidence, delivering innovative and portable solutions while streamlining operations across your cloud environments.

[Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MicrosoftDocs/cloud-adoption-framework/master/docs/scenarios/hybrid/scenario-overview.md]