While most organizations believe that hybrid and multi-cloud architectures are a “must have,” according to a recent study from Google, it’s clear that cloud migration is still in its early days. Although every organization is thinking about it, few have been successful in adopting it.
With the benefits becoming clear, why are organizations slow to adopt these new cloud architectures? Without the right automation tools in place, it’s difficult to tackle some of the major challenges that arise when implementing a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.
The Challenges of Managing Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Before we dive into how automation can help, it’s important to understand what you’re up against and the most common challenges organizations face when deploying and managing hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure.
Cost Control & Management
One of the key concerns in any environment – public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud – is cost. Research shows the average cloud project goes 14% over budget with the cloud’s portion of the tech budget set to jump by 67%.
Ironically, one of the drivers of hybrid cloud architectures is the wish to diversify away from public cloud, where some customers are concerned about their lack of control over costs, as they are locked into a provider that can set the pricing. But while hybrid cloud can indeed diversify away from this threat, that doesn’t mean it comes at a discounted rate. To support a hybrid cloud environment, organizations must dedicate resources, both team members and tools, for the development and management of a private cloud.
Tool Sprawl & Overload
Limitations can be caused by too many groups across an enterprise using too many different tools and clouds. According to a survey conducted by CloudBolt Software, 79% of respondents said they are “hitting a wall” using existing tools and platforms, suggesting organizations need better ways to ensure the balance of tools needed versus tool overload is met.
In a survey by Zesty, 58% of respondents viewed the search for the best cloud offering to match their workload needs as the most difficult element of managing cloud costs. This reflects the same challenge, which is to find accurate and comprehensive tools without buying too many different products.
Compliance & Shadow IT Concerns
Organizations need centralized systems in place to monitor activity on a wide variety of cloud platforms, know where business units may be using off-the-grid cloud services (shadow IT), and develop a way to enforce IT standards and guidelines (compliance). Hybrid cloud delivers much-needed flexibility and agility in cloud operations, but it can also introduce complexity and compliance difficulties.
Networking Bottlenecks
Between recent research from Futuriom and our experience at Itential with our own customers, the network has proven to be the most common challenge to successfully implementing a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.
Hybrid and multi-cloud implementations put more demands than ever on networking infrastructure. Connecting different computing domains or platforms requires a flexible networking infrastructure that can also be managed and monitored to ensure security and compliance.
Current tools are holding organizations back from being able to successfully build a flexible networking infrastructure that can cross the bridge between enterprise, private data center, and public cloud – a requirement for cloud migration success.
How Automation Can Overcome Hybrid Cloud Networking Challenges with Confidence
Existing references to network automation are often focused on one silo – enterprise, data center, or cloud – and aren’t useful in automating all networks required for a flexible infrastructure that supports hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. A new kind of hybrid network automation is needed to mitigate the challenges that come with cloud architectures.
Hybrid network automation requires a flexible networking infrastructure that can also be managed, monitored to ensure security and compliance, and automated to ensure no downtime or errors and to streamline overall operations and management. By leveraging an integrated automation platform like Itential, teams can tie together ANY networking domain, whether it’s traditional networking infrastructure or more modern cloud-based networking infrastructure using APIs and networking standards.
The Itential Automation Platform provides a federated source of truth for all data sources and IT systems, enabling teams to take advantage of all the resources at their disposal while drastically reducing the time it takes to manage and deploy network configurations accurately. With Itential’s automation capabilities organizations can achieve a smooth hybrid cloud adoption that doesn’t come at the expense of time, budget, and compliance.
To learn more about these challenges and how to mitigate them, check out the full Futuriom report here. You can also learn about Itential is helping organizations of all sizes simplify and scale automation across their hybrid cloud network infrastructure here.
Kristen H. Rachels
Chief Marketing Officer ‐ Itential
Kristen serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Itential, leading their go-to-market strategy and execution to accelerate the adoption and expansion of the company’s products and services.
