What Are The Major Challenges Of Adopting A Hybrid Cloud Approach?

Using a hybrid cloud approach most definitely seems to be the way forward due to the benefits accrued by using private clouds and public clouds. Hybrid cloud computing is key to efficient management of a firm’s application workloads as different applications require a different platform. However, hybrid cloud does not come without its fair share of challenges and issues. The challenges include security concerns, effective management problems, migration complexities, components partitioning, trust issues, scheduling and execution issues, and numerous other problems. You should remember that these problems are not insurmountable, but they will take some effort to solve. Security risks Risk associated with security are probably the biggest challenge facing hybrid cloud adoption. The whole reason behind having a private cloud is to safeguard sensitive data. With a hybrid cloud model, firms need to simultaneously manage different security platforms. In this moment, transfer of selective data between private and public clouds becomes crucial. Data externalization leads to issues such as data protections and identity management. The issue of who has access to what and where comes to the fore as valuable data cannot be transferred to the public cloud. The problem is magnified if you have different cloud providers such as Microsoft and Amazon. Hence, management becomes critical as firms need to carefully monitor how data flows between public and private clouds. Integration complexity Successfully integrating private and public clouds is one of the biggest issues that needs to be solved effectively to aid hybrid cloud infrastructure. The technical skills required to integrate multiple cloud services is quite high. While transferring regular applications between clouds is quite easy, moving configurations and Meta data across environments is more difficult. Comparability is one of the biggest issues plaguing integration. The nature of the integration workload will ultimately determine which host you select and if hybrid cloud is feasible in the moment. Understanding the patterns and tools required to move processes may be a challenge to even the most seasoned cloud technicians. Also, the integration of legacy systems with cloud computing is a complex matter as well. Creating the infrastructure to manage this integration is complex as hundreds of applications may be involved. Cloud management is a thankless task As there is little-to-no standardization for management and configurations of cloud services across different providers, organizations are left to scramble to create an efficient strategy. It is hard to understand how to allocate computational resources as infrastructure can be markedly different across cloud providers. Dealing with servers that exist across multiple environments is critical as a firm will need to understand when an application or an environment is over provisioned or under provisioned. In addition, you need to account for the ever changing behaviors of resources, end-users, and networks. With cloud computing, you need to understand that nothing is truly infinite and cloud managers need to be aware of maximum scalability levels. Understanding the constraints of each environment is crucial to efficient management and ensuring that resources are not wasted. Change and scale complications Every firm will have a set limit for scalability that may need to be revised from time to time. Volumes tend to grow exponentially and keeping abreast of environment limitations and infrastructure is critical to ensuring that you do not overshoot. This is especially true for dynamic and ever scaling clouds. As application are interconnected in a cloud environment, issues with one application could invariably cause your other applications to malfunction, leading to unnecessary complications. Application load supporting needs to be carefully managed as it can be quite difficult to understand the true limits of data capacity in an environment. This is why load testing is important to the success of any cloud environment. Setting up a solid infrastructure will solve most of your problems and while this may be a time consuming process , the long-term benefits are apparent to any organization that seeks to pursue a long-term hybrid cloud computing approach. Network design Any hybrid cloud computing model that seeks to have long-term success needs to have excellent network design. Your network needs to account for various factors such as network bandwidth, management between public and private clouds, the impact of location on your network, the network requirements for each individual application, the security requirements of different types of data, and numerous other factors. Different sets of applications need to operate in different parts of your cloud environment. Understanding the scalability requirements of each application will influence your network and infrastructure design. Cloud managers also need to factor in the limitations of public clouds when it comes to networking and they need to develop strategies to work around this. However, services such as Azure and Cloud Hybrid Service are now providing solutions that allow customers to safely broaden existing data centers without compromising on security and response levels.