Stakes raised for hybrid cloud as complexity challenges continue

Taking comfort from cloud

While perhaps some workloads might be moving back on-premise, Stapley doubts that’s as prevalent as some commentators have suggested. What’s more, a flight from the cloud back to on-premise is likely to be about poor governance, he says.

“The maturity of cloud means that people are more comfortable; the old security concerns or three or four years ago don’t really exist in the same way,” Stapley continues. “There’s so much innovation in cloud, and that’s the draw.”

Stapley adds that the internet of things (IoT) and edge alone will create massive volumes of data. Organisations might intuitively think of public cloud as a solution for coping with that, but there are still myriad applications and workloads that remain on-premise in datacentres.

While more organisations will move to public cloud, many will prefer to be more circumspect. Knock-on requirements will emphasise networking as well as modernisation in the datacentre.

Customers often prefer to modernise project by project, instead of taking a best approach would be “a true hybrid solution” such as Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure, especially if they’ve evolved as a collection of acquisitions rather than a single entity, Stapley says.

No one wants to simply junk their datacentre investment to cope with new business models, but there will be more review and revision of the datacentre infrastructure capabilities, which will also increasingly need to be in line with sustainability drivers and environmental impacts, he explains.

“Then, of course, all the things that have been talked about previously around the ability to control services, the ability to monitor, observe what’s going on, to manage the security, all of those tools being able to work across both environments still stay true,” Stapley says.

That said, some organisations are still sort of standing back from the brink a little bit, and there continues to be “a fragmentation of thinking” about the best routes forward.

Also, trends such as edge, IoT and 5G are being built into companies’ sales propositions, driving complexity and scale in multiple areas, from services management to data transportation and analysis. IT departments will continue to struggle – and need assistance from the right skilled teams, Stapley says. 

Should cloud providers push organisations further?

Martin Percival, senior solutions architect at Red Hat, agrees that edge and automation will drive cloud complexity and hybrid deployment, noting that organisations will often default to the thing they originally picked as a corporate standard, or jump into a specific cloud simply because that’s where their software as a service (SaaS) is hosted.

“As a result, you can end up with an awful problem even if you didn’t start out thinking about it that way,” Percival says. “A lot of people are starting to talk about that.”

A leap of faith might be required to unstick some organisations from their tried-and-true providers or locked-in offerings and migrate them to cloud offerings that deliver greater benefits, which means encouraging customers to act more strategically instead of just reacting to issues.

Percival says that he expects an expansion of multicloud with “a bit of on-premise” this year, with more organisations through the pandemic have been exploring public cloud as well.

“Customers themselves can have a kind of confusion and just need a trustee to help guide them through. As an industry we need to get better at explaining what individual steps can be taken,” Percival warns.

“The challenge you’ve got now is as soon as you make one thing easy, you then add six different other things next to it and say, well, how do I make it all work together?”