EDITOR’S QUESTION
In addition, when choosing a
cloud provider, businesses should
ensure that they are ‘enterprise ready’
– to enable them to move to the cloud
with confidence.
Suitable cloud providers will have
industry recognised certifications and
will be able to evidence their credibility
by providing availability, performance
and security metrics when requested.
Cloud services should be subject to strict
penalty backed SLAs.
Organisations should also be aware of
the hidden costs associated with some
hyperscale cloud providers, e.g. ingress
and egress over Internet and between
regions, disk IO charges, etc., in order to
avoid unpleasant bill shocks at month
end. Predictable billing is important
for budgeting.
ANDREW CRUISE,
MANAGING
DIRECTOR, ROUTED
ybrid IT methodologies
allow enterprises to
span their IT estate
across private and public
clouds with a consistent
user experience.
This consistent experience is typically
achieved by being able to use the
same development, administration and
management software(s) across cloud
infrastructures. Public cloud providers
should at a minimum easily enable the use
of this software on their infrastructure and
preferably have integrations and extensions
with industry standard PaaS (Platform-as-
a-Service) tools such as Kubernetes.
H
Although the explicit requirement
for seamless hybrid integration is a
homogeneous set of software tools,
realistically applications which reside on
owned infrastructure are not yet cloud-
30
Issue 11
Lastly, it is evident that compliance and
data sovereignty concerns may well
influence an enterprise’s decision on
which cloud provider to utilise. Data
locality requirements may compel the use
of in-country providers only.
native (i.e. cloud ready) and therefore
the foundation for hybridity must start
at the virtualisation layer – without a
uniform hypervisor across environments
the required mobility, scalability, elasticity
and agility for current workloads cannot
be achieved. And so, enterprises should
match their owned infrastructure’s
hypervisor to their chosen cloud.
A further critical requirement is
connectivity: true hybridity relies on a
secure, reliable and performant connection
between clouds. This is best achieved
through Software Defined Networking,
where networking functions are abstracted
from underlying hardware facilitating
secure, painless extension to public cloud.
Organisations should carefully choose
their cloud provider with these two key
points in mind.
HYBRID IT
METHODOLOGIES
ALLOW
ENTERPRISES
TO SPAN THEIR
IT ESTATE
ACROSS PRIVATE
AND PUBLIC
CLOUDS WITH
A CONSISTENT
USER
EXPERIENCE.
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