VMware for Small-Medium Business Blog: Moving to Hybrid Cloud: Top Considerations
This post originally appeared on the VMware vCloud blog
Some of the public cloud’s most popular features include its agility and scalability, but unfortunately, some of its less popular aspects, such as security and complexity concerns, can be hard to ignore.
Enter the hybrid cloud : a solution designed to help make meeting business demands not only easy, but secure as well. The hybrid cloud combines everything businesses love about the public cloud with manageable internal control systems.
Is your organization ready to take the plunge into hybrid cloud?
Here are five considerations to take into account before deploying your workloads to the hybrid cloud:
1. Existing and new application support
A major inconvenience sometimes found in cloud platforms is incompatibility between your current IT infrastructure and the public cloud. Additionally, applications must be rewritten for the public cloud, and users can face difficulty in moving between workloads in different locations.
The VMware vCloud Hybrid Service makes on-demand application portability easy, because it’s built on the same VMware vSphere platform you already use in your data center. The vCloud Hybrid Service not only supports a wide variety of Linux and Windows-based operating systems, but it also supports over 5,724 applications – all certified to run on vSphere.
2. Security and compliance
Organizations consistently identify security and compliance issues as obstacles to widespread cloud adoption, particularly for mission-critical applications. Therefore, it’s important to look for a public cloud infrastructure that meet your specific security and compliance requirements.
To ensure a controlled environment, VMware delivers a policy-driven approach to provisioning, which embeds software-defined security and resource consumption controls so preconfigured IT policies are automatically enforced, thus enabling you to accelerate provisioning without loss of security, compliance, or control.
3. High availability
With some public cloud environments, customers may be required to reconfigure existing applications to match their service provider’s platform. This not only adds complexity to the process, but also can lead to lower performance and availability of applications.
Avoiding the platform limitations of a typical cloud service provider, the vCloud Hybrid Service offers automated replication, monitoring, and high availability of your applications, without requiring any code changes. The service also has built-in capabilities to eliminate application downtime due to planned server maintenance.
4. Network bandwidth and reliability
Each time an application is deployed to the public cloud, manual network reconfiguration is typically required, which can result in various errors or network compatibility constraints. When moving workloads to the cloud, you don’t want to choose between two equally undesirable options – deploying applications into one of two discrete environments or throwing away your investment in your existing datacenter – to take advantage of the benefits of cloud.
Fortunately, the vCloud Hybrid Service is built on a seamless virtualized network that allows for firewall and network configurations as if they were in your own data center, so you can replicate the network your apps need for operation. You can also extend corporate controls into vCloud Hybrid Service by leveraging the same directory infrastructure as your existing data center.
5. Time to value
Time is valuable, so it is essential to provide IT and business teams with a highly reliable, stable, secure, and fully supported environment that can take them from zero to cloud in hours, not weeks. You need a cloud solution that allows you to take all of your applications straight to the cloud without any reconfiguring or recoding necessary. When considering workloads for hybrid cloud, it’s important to evaluate ease of migration, breadth of support for existing applications and operating systems, and an easy way to manage your workloads across cloud environments.
The vCloud Hybrid Service allows for you to go from zero to cloud in hours, saving time and money in the process. By leveraging the same platform you already run internally, you can extend your management tools into the cloud, providing an integrated IT capability across your data center and the cloud.
Hybrid clouds can help organizations meet business demands using IT resources in an efficient and secure manner. By following the five considerations mentioned above, you’ll be one step closer to crafting an efficient strategy to move your workloads to the public cloud.
For more information about moving to a hybrid cloud, take a look at our information brief .
To get started with the vCloud Hybrid Service, visit vCloud.VMware.com.
via VMware Blogs http://bit.ly/1cZo3H2