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“If we consider a large modern enterprise, we might have two, three, four data centers; three, four, five public cloud providers; dozens or even hundreds of edge locations,” Sinclair says. “And we always have data moving everywhere and applications moving.”

For example, according to London Stock Exchange Group Nikolay Plaunov, tens of hundreds of data centers operate applications and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. He is a director and technologist in the infrastructure and cloud division of LSEG, the diversified company that runs the stock market, and also provides data-driven financial services. Its portfolio of applications includes containerized applications running in the cloud, virtualized running on-premises, and has applications running on legacy hosts.

“The thing that really impresses people today compared to probably five or 10 years ago is, ‘I have these things in my data center and I have them, I’ve moved them to the public cloud and I need to manage them. much more,” adds Sinclair. “I live in a world where I no longer just have to manage a lot more, but also deal with data and applications that are constantly moving in all directions.”

From an information technology (IT) perspective, one of the most significant impacts of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has been the sudden, unplanned transition of applications to the cloud as organizations move rapidly to accommodate remote workers and online shoppers increase. Companies today find themselves with one foot in the cloud and the other on-premises and face significant challenges in how to manage, secure and control costs in this hybrid IT environment.

A hybrid cloud IT infrastructure where resources are distributed across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments enables companies to accelerate time to market, drive innovation, and increase the efficiency of business processes. And companies are keen on their promises: More than a third (37%) say hybrid is an investment priority for the next year and a half, according to a 2021 ESG survey of 372 IT professionals.

But the complexity of managing a hybrid cloud gift challenges chief information officers, including compatibility with legacy equipment, cybersecurity concerns, and cost issues associated with moving data and managing data access.

To successfully manage a hybrid cloud environment, organizations need a specially designed hybrid cloud management plan that includes the right tools and strategies. These approaches may be as diverse as the types of businesses out there, but some guidelines apply across industries – for example, the need for a central control plane to use automation to manage IT operations and move from managing infrastructure to managing service level agreements with vendors.

Everything starts with apps

Russell Skinsley, chief technology officer of digital infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara, says most customers begin their cloud journeys with somewhat unrealistic expectations. They originally believed that all applications would eventually be in the cloud.

What they found was that “there are things we can move, there are things we can move, and there are definitely things we can’t move,” says Skinsley.

Sinclair adds that while the rising tide is certainly upgrading enterprise applications from the data center to the public cloud, there is a countercurrent that organizations are moving some applications from the cloud back to the data center. Some of the reasons cited by organizations cite the complexity of hybrid cloud management: these include data precision, performance and availability requirements.

To effectively move applications to the public cloud, organizations need to establish a systematic methodology, an almost factory-style assembly line that analyzes every application in its portfolio and then decides which ones to “remove” or replace to the cloud as they are. which to refactor or rewrite to take full advantage of the cloud, and which to keep on-premises.

The first step is to make an inventory of the application portfolio. This can help organizations eliminate duplication and identify applications that no longer serve a business purpose and can be retired. The next step is to analyze the applications in terms of business results. Next, organizations need to make decisions based on factors such as time, risk, cost, and value.

At the London Stock Exchange Group, Plaunov consistently balances cost with business criticality. Each application is different and requires its own specific calculation. “I’ve seen a few apps removed and moved to the cloud, and in some cases optimizing them and optimizing their cost is relatively simple.” In other cases, converting a monolithic application to the public cloud can be expensive as it requires breaking the application into smaller components.

The company’s risk management team analyzed its portfolio of applications and identified 14 high-priority applications in one of the business units. “If the application is business critical and running on infrastructure that is not yet used, doing something about it is the obvious choice. And if you’re already budgeting for some changes to an app, unless there are regulatory or technological limitations, then it’s a candidate to go to the public cloud.”

As more and more businesses deploy devices and sensors with more internet connectivity, they find themselves performing an initial data transaction at the edge, moving data to the cloud or a data center. To move data between nodes in the most efficient way, organizations must determine which data should be data processing and how to distribute it.

As a result, a hybrid cloud needs to become a resilient, durable fabric that can meet changing business needs and respond instantly, with core storage resources that provide data processing and analytics, with core storage resources that automatically respond to business, and rotate new application instances as needed. needs, says Skinsley.

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This content is produced by Insights, the exclusive content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by the editorial staff of MIT Technology Review.