FEATURE
FEATURE
See the future
After you’ve assessed your current
situation, you’ll want to take a look at
future needs. What new apps and services
are due to come online in the coming year?
Any planned changes for key infrastructure
components like hypervisors? What
new business or tech initiatives are you
planning when it comes to Big Data, IoT
or DevOps? What additional resources will
new workloads require?
Once you’ve assessed your situation and
established some high-level hybrid cloud
goals, you’ll have these five key decisions
to make:
Decision 1: Choosing your cloud
operating framework
First things first This is the first and most important
decision you’ll make. Don’t back into
this one – make it up front. You’ll need a
cloud OS that lets you monitor, manage
and orchestrate across all environments
with a single set of tools while enabling
users to work easily in any environment.
Determine the pieces your cloud OS will
need to encompass including support for
on-premise, public and CSPs, mode 1 and
mode 2 apps, VMs or containers, etc. This
will prep you to properly consider your
best cloud operating framework option.
Before we decide where we’re going, let’s
look at where we are. Decision 2: Determining your on-
premises modernisation strategy
The very first step in moving forward
with an evolved hybrid cloud strategy
is asking questions about your current
infrastructure. Identify all locations where
you have infrastructure, services and data. By 2021 it’s predicted that enterprises
will run on-premises and in the cloud with
about a 50/50 split. With that in mind, on-
premise needs can’t be ignored even while
we have our heads in the clouds. Your
critical capability list will include elements
like software-defined, hyperconverged,
ease of automation, self-service enabled,
data protection/disaster recovery ready
and distributed and Edge capable.
Then begin asking questions like:
Aaron White, General Manager –
METI at Nutanix
shifting and many IT organisations are
raising their hands and saying ‘not quite
ready’. Today’s struggle is creating an
effective hybrid cloud strategy for a more
functional, future-ready infrastructure and
making the data centre modernisation
decisions that will support new
technology. So, where do you start?
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
• What infrastructure and staff resources
do we have in each location?
• What percentage of the infrastructure
is traditional/siloed? Virtualised?
Private cloud?
• What parts of the business rely on
this location?
• Why are we using the cloud providers
we have now?
• Why is x workload running in x location?
. . . and so on.
Decision 3: Choosing specific
cloud environments for your
hybrid cloud
The main goal here? Pick cloud providers
that align ideally with the decisions
you’ve already made up to this point and
choose them based on compatibility.
This will equate to a more seamless
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