The growth and success of your business demands enterprise-wide agility, flexibility and adaptability. This inevitably means doing things differently and constant change for your workforce and business processes. IT is likely to be an enabler and driver of this change, but business and operational requirements can sometimes inhibit its use and adoption. Public cloud services provide us with a good example of this. Yes, they can deliver real business benefits, but the cost might be a level of compromise that the organization is unwilling or unable to make. Hybrid cloud solutions seek to address these challenges while potentially unlocking additional levels of business value and IT capability.
If you work for a large organization, chances are you’re already using a mix of cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and deployment models (private, public, hybrid) to support your business processes, applications and workloads. And the cloud model itself (on-demand, self-service, broad network access, rapid elasticity, and metered services) is also likely to be imbuing your overall IT strategy, steering it in the direction of ‘hybrid IT’. This blending of models and architectures is driving the evolution of enterprise IT and cloud computing more generally, because what is one without the other.
If we look at public cloud services, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, we see that the market is developing at a rapid cadence. The services available include a growing range of innovative (and commodity) platform capabilities. These potentially enable organizations, with the help of their IT departments and service providers, to be more agile, more flexible, and more adaptable.
We all know the benefits of public cloud by now – easy access, scale as needed, and no up-front costs – but your organization’s ability to adopt and employ public cloud services, especially platform services, is governed by its policies, strategies, processes, knowledge, skills and geography. And let’s not forget those external factors relating to regulation, compliance and availability. So, if you want all the benefits of public cloud, it seems like compromises have to be made somewhere along the line.
Compromise has always been a part of business and the enterprise IT decision making process. But the wrong kind of compromise can be costly, resulting in a situation that could hinder the business and burden IT for some considerable period of time. Hybrid cloud, with its promise of data and application portability between cloud infrastructures, presents a technological way forward here. However, for this to be fully realized, those public cloud services mentioned earlier need full portability too.
AWS and Google have both announced initiatives in this area, but in this paper, sponsored by Fujitsu, we’re going to look at Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, using Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub as our practical example where necessary. We don’t endorse or recommend specific solutions, but the combined Fujitsu and Microsoft offering serves to illustrate the nature and possibilities of hybrid cloud and how you might employ public cloud software and infrastructure on your own terms in your own data center.
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