How The Great Divide Between Network & Cloud Teams Causes Hybrid Cloud Failures

When implementing a hybrid cloud, network and cloud teams may be divided. Discover why this divide can hurt success and why collaboration is necessary.

With the adoption of the hybrid cloud, cloud and network teams risk interfering with network performance and can cause new levels of digital dysfunction if they cannot prioritize collaboration. This interdependent relationship between these teams will be crucial for success.

The movement of applications and services from on-prem data centers to public cloud platforms is being driven by many factors. So, how can the enterprise cloud and network teams work together to manage this new, complex reality that is hybrid cloud networking? Proper executive leadership is necessary to bring both teams together and support modern software that bolsters a combined team effort to manage cloud networking. If handled poorly, IT professionals can lose out on the benefits of cloud and network team collaboration and find themselves exposing their businesses to security, performance, and stability issues in the hybrid cloud environment. A recent report found that 82% of enterprises have suffered business-level problems as a result of poor collaboration between cloud and network infrastructure teams.

Within the hybrid cloud environment, teams are also faced with the challenges that come with more applications moving from the traditional data center to cloud platforms. Proper migration requires not only a deep understanding of cloud structure but also orchestrating data transferral in a manner that doesn’t outstep network boundaries. In tandem, IT professionals are also adopting more cloud-based SaaS solutions.

This is another critical reason to bring traditional on-prem network and cloud teams together – to align with this increasing level of adoption. While SaaS adoption in an enterprise isn’t a direct part of hybrid cloud, network and cloud teams working together enables access to SaaS applications that are secure and perform efficiently across on-prem and cloud networks. This calls for a common platform to manage cloud networking together, especially considering the current nature of the workforce, still being dispersed across both remote and in-office locations.

By working together, teams can benefit from strong connections to IT systems/services through the internet while still maintaining existing on-prem network infrastructure (data centers, campus, remote office). Otherwise, the impacts of team division could interfere with network performance and spread digital dysfunction across an entire organization.

Risk in Network and Cloud Team Divide

In today’s IT environment, ensuring protection against threat actors has become a top priority and challenge that can be tackled from many different directions. Most commonly, these challenges stem from issues around security-related downtime, compliance violations, and data leaks which all require both network and cloud expertise to eliminate effectively. For example, with compliance violations this has become even more widespread with the expansion of network infrastructure into multiple cloud platforms.

Without a combined team approach to align all new virtual devices in tandem with existing on-prem devices, this can often lead to non-compliance, posing difficulties in disjointed management tools and file misconfiguration. In fact, 73% of enterprises have experienced security and compliance issues as a result of poor collaboration between the two groups.

These types of issues also directly impact network performance, as they can harm the functions of cloud applications and cause slow responses/failure during application rollouts. However, this can be prevented through more cloud system instruction and the identification of red flags that might otherwise be overlooked by network professionals who lack specialized knowledge in cloud integration. In some cases, impacts can be even more severe, with 89& of enterprises having experienced IT operations issues as a result of this team division. Network outages can also happen due to a number of complex factors, one being human error from lack of knowledge and understanding when it comes to manual misconfiguration changes – 80% of unplanned outages reported this to be the cause.

With closer collaboration throughout these types of processes, network and cloud teams can save their organizations both time and money in network improvement and, as a result, impact overall business revenue. These team connections are no longer a nice-to-have but necessary to remain stable and successful within a modernized IT environment.

Necessary Collaboration in Modernized IT Infrastructures

As organizations focus on modernizing their IT infrastructures, end-users and employees are looking to strengthen their connections to services and servers across on-prem, cloud, and internet environments. In keeping business flowing smoothly across hybrid workplaces, network services need to perform securely, regardless of the underlying connections, either on-prem or in the cloud. However, since cloud networking is more complex in nature, management teams require more network expertise to successfully utilize applications. Similarly, network teams are not as familiar with cloud technologies, especially when it comes to hybrid cloud programs.

Organizations need to set the stage for a closer working relationship between the two teams to fully reap the benefits of modern IT technology. For example, monitoring management and automation of network assets and infrastructure across hybrid cloud environments can be especially daunting, as processes and procedures can differ across private versus public clouds. Taking a unified approach when deploying tools that support this can help build confidence and increase overall IT team productivity for network and cloud team operations. This can be done through specialized team training and education on the basics of the other team’s technologies. As a result, teams can more easily simplify cloud and other network tool processes to prevent siloed management and reduce complexities.

Setting the Stage for a Lasting Partnership

Taking this a step further, to ensure an ongoing successful partnership between network and cloud teams, organizations need to unify their approach at the start when deploying new tools for managing the modern network. Because traditional networking tools do not support cloud-based networking, there is no clear path to support these collaborations due to a lack of application programming interface (API) integration as a foundational technology.

Tapping into capabilities such as automation to unify hybrid cloud operations can help bridge this gap between foundational and modern technologies, forming a path between cloud and network teams that is unique for each organization. In moving down this path, IT professionals need to use cloud-native APIs to connect, automate, secure, and improve networking across hybrid cloud programs. Therefore, in leveraging existing command-line interface (CLI) techniques used by networking teams to manage datacenter networks, combined with APIs exposed by cloud platforms, organizations can effectively enable and sustain cross-domain connectivity and services.

At the same time, network teams must bring network compliance processes to cloud-based infrastructure as there is an evolving need for compliance across both network and cloud assets which are CLI and API-driven, respectively. One method to successfully accommodate this is by proactively managing compliance through automation. This will be a key component of modernized IT strategy going forward for strong security across the network and avoidance of bad/vulnerable changes in the network across the board, whether it’s on-prem in a data center or the cloud. For organizations to ultimately pave the path to success for their IT departments, network teams must get up to speed in the automation of the network, as this is foundational for cloud teams as well.

Organizations have been challenged by rapid technical deployments and heavy reliance on online communication when navigating difficulties due to the ongoing pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as more businesses decide to return to their physical office space, the role of the IT team will be critical as workspaces transition to a hybrid work model. With that said, it is important to bring cross-team collaboration back to the forefront of IT planning as the interdependent relationship between cloud and network team managers will continue to be key for success.

Article originally published on Toolbox.com.