As the digital landscape continues to evolve, more and more organizations are embracing the power of hybrid and multicloud environments. Microsoft Azure, as an enterprise-grade cloud provider, offers a comprehensive suite of products and features to help you build and operate your technology solutions across public, hybrid, and multicloud setups.

Defining Hybrid and Multicloud

A hybrid cloud is a type of cloud computing that combines a private cloud (on-premises infrastructure) with a public cloud (computing services offered by third-party providers over the public internet). Hybrid clouds allow data and applications to seamlessly move between the two cloud environments. Many organizations choose a hybrid cloud strategy to meet specific business requirements, such as regulatory and data sovereignty needs, maximizing existing technology investments, or addressing latency issues.

The hybrid cloud is also evolving to include edge workloads. Cloud-managed edge computing devices bring the power of the public cloud closer to the IoT devices and data sources, reducing latency and enabling reliable offline operation. This expands compute, storage, and service availability closer to your customers, delivering a more responsive and tailored experience.

Multicloud computing, on the other hand, refers to the use of multiple cloud computing services from more than one cloud provider, including both private and public clouds. A multicloud strategy provides greater flexibility and risk mitigation, allowing organizations to choose the best-fit services for specific tasks or take advantage of unique offerings in different geographic regions.

Hybrid and Multicloud Motivations

There are several common business drivers that lead organizations to distribute their digital estate across hybrid and multicloud environments:

  1. Avoiding single cloud provider lock-in: Diversifying across multiple cloud platforms can help minimize dependence on a single provider.
  2. Accommodating business units or acquired companies: Different teams or organizations may have already adopted different cloud platforms.
  3. Meeting regulatory and data sovereignty requirements: Certain geopolitical regions may have specific compliance or data residency needs.
  4. Improving business continuity and disaster recovery: Duplicating workloads across multiple cloud providers can enhance resilience.
  5. Maximizing performance: Running applications closer to user locations may require a hybrid or multicloud approach.
  6. Enabling easy migration: Adopting multicloud strategies can facilitate the migration of certain data platforms or industry-specific applications.

Hybrid and Multicloud Concerns

While the motivations above can drive significant business transformations, they also introduce challenges that require substantial pre-deployment and post-deployment efforts to overcome.

One common concern is the risk of cloud provider lock-in. To avoid this, organizations may have to limit their cloud adoption to basic infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities or heavily invest in cloud-native technologies like containers or Kubernetes. This can prevent them from leveraging the most beneficial products and features offered by a specific cloud provider.

Another concern arises after the workloads are in production: operations management. Existing operations management platforms, policies, and processes were often not designed to support the complexities of hybrid and multicloud environments. Companies may end up with disparate tooling and practices, which can significantly increase the cost of operations.

Minimizing Hybrid and Multicloud Concerns with Unified Operations

To address these challenges, it’s important to understand the concept of unified operations before embarking on your hybrid and multicloud journey. Consistent operations practices across all your cloud environments, with a common control plane, can help mitigate many of the concerns associated with hybrid and multicloud strategies.

Evaluate whether you need to duplicate operations for each cloud provider or implement a unified operations approach to cloud management before proceeding with hybrid and multicloud adoption at scale.

By leveraging a unified operations approach, you can gain visibility into the health of your infrastructure and applications, streamline policy and update integration, unify development practices, and enhance your security posture across your hybrid and multicloud environments.

Navigating the hybrid and multicloud landscape can be complex, but with the right strategy and tools, you can maximize the benefits while minimizing the concerns. Azure’s comprehensive offerings and Microsoft’s expertise in this space can be invaluable as you embark on your cloud transformation journey.

Source: Introduction to hybrid and multicloud