By Raghav K.
The IT industry has witnessed numerous changes. Some of these changes were the start of paradigm shifts. Businesses and organizations have to evolve to meet the changing trends of any industry. There is no specific way to evolve or migrate to a new trend or practice in any industry. Hybrid cloud can be the starting point for your digital transformation journey.
When we talk about the digital transformation journey, we need to understand the word journey. It is a journey that is best carried out over some time. There is no plug-and-play option that works with business migration. Alibaba Cloud has years of experience with cloud migration, including solutions that cater to the different needs of the masses.
Your migration strategy is custom and relates to your current setup, business model, and technologies. Making drastic changes and shifting to an entirely new practice will do more harm than good. In the previous articles of this series, I explained a few practices to help you strategize your move to the cloud. I also explained the adoption model of hybrid cloud and how you can make it more effective.
In this article, I will explain the best practices to overcome hybrid cloud challenges, inducing continuity in your cloud, and differentiating between cloud assets and liabilities.
Hybrid cloud statistics speak for themselves. Most cloud providers will tell you how productive hybrid clouds have been. Moving forward, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud (or multi-hybrid-cloud) will be the way organizations function. Bringing hybridity into the equation also introduces a unique level of security and reliability.
The most common challenges faced by the organization shifting to a hybrid cloud are listed below:
Migrations are complex and create an uneven ground for different departments within your organization. A strong application strategy can help you overcome this obstacle. You can formulate a migration cycle that trains your personnel to educate themselves and adapt to new technological changes.
We recommend creating a small technological fabric that works as an overlay between your current and future service trends. For example, you can reel in independent applications or deploy applications yourself using the Alibaba Cloud Web App Service. If you have multiple applications and bigger infrastructure needs, you can use the Alibaba Cloud Simple Application Server for deployment.
By implementing a hybrid cloud solution using Alibaba Cloud, you can run applications on-premises and on a public cloud with an option of connecting applications hosted separately on Alibaba Cloud.
Alibaba Cloud provides a superb integration between different services and solutions. These solutions are a prime example of the fabric I mentioned previously. You should create a solution that helps you harvest productivity for your personalized service cycle.
Let’s take containerization as an example. You can deploy with Docker or Kubernetes. Both of these solutions are used often and backed by a strong open-source community. Both of them can help you implement containers but with some differences. Similarly, you may face obstacles when using different operating systems, virtualization environments, and storage architectures.
Another common obstacle while working with infrastructure and platforms is their availability in different regions and zone. If you have a specific market base that requires you to operate from within Mainland China, you have to use the Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud solution. Make sure you choose the infrastructure that helps you cater to your target audience.
You should opt for the take what you can strategy to initialize an effective cloud migration strategy. It helps you shift your applications and data to the cloud while keeping your traditional applications on-premises.
You need to make note of how much you want your cloud provider to manage. You can choose Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The differences are on the chart below:
Organizations can come across situations where they need to trade-off some parts of their current business value. The changes could be small things or traditional practices that change the way an organization conducts business. Here, the small trade-offs are OK and will not affect the core business values.
The bigger changes are the ones that happen while maintaining your current business values. There are two options that you can take when dealing with these obstacles:
We suggest using microservices. We are not suggesting rewriting the entire application code and developing a new cloud-native application solution. We suggest splitting your traditional application into smaller modules that will help you easily migrate and maintain your core business values. This approach also offers easier application maintenance with lower O&M costs.
Hybrid cloud incorporates private and public clouds. You can keep your traditional application in-house within your on-premises setup and develop a cloud-native solution side-by-side.
Planning hybrid cloud adoption thoroughly will lead to the most success. Choosing the right cloud partner, optimizing your applications, and working with a talented team are the ingredients for a robust hybrid cloud practice.
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