By Nicholas Holian, WW Field CTO, Nutanix
This post is the second in a series that focuses on the value of a hybrid multicloud infrastructure. In our first installment, we established some definitions and highlighted the benefits of moving from multiple siloed cloud environments to a true, unified hybrid multicloud ecosystem—the modern approach to cloud management. In this post, we’ll discuss the steps that will get you started on your hybrid multicloud journey.
When you’re ready to make the move to a unified hybrid multicloud environment, it might seem daunting at first. You are most likely currently managing multiple operational silos across public, private, and possibly hybrid clouds and have been for years, and adapting to the minor and major inconveniences those disparate environments are causing you today. As we mentioned in our first installment, those silos were created over an extended period of time when the idea of public cloud and of datacenters moving to private clouds was new and emerging and the tools for unifying all of your IT environments didn’t even exist.
Now, the tools, platforms and partners—let’s call it the ecosystem—do exist, and the journey from multiple clouds to a hybrid multicloud environment doesn’t have to be as challenging as it sounds. In this article, we will look at six steps you can take to create the hybrid multicloud environment your organization needs to host its modern applications. It’s not an overnight undertaking, but with the right strategy and approach, it is achievable.
Before diving into making any infrastructure changes, it’s essential to have a complete and clear understanding of your existing IT infrastructure, every silo it contains and the business workloads that are running on that infrastructure. This includes not just official, sanctioned workloads and infrastructure, but also any shadow IT—unofficial, unsanctioned (or “allowed” but not managed by IT) IT systems that could be in play across various teams or departments and their associated workloads. Also, remember to root out potential multiple silos within each cloud environment. You might have multiple AWS (or Azure or on-prem private cloud) instances across the organization that have different design, build, or operating models.
Give employees time to disclose all of their IT environments, even the hidden or unapproved ones. Ensuring amnesty and avoiding penalties for revealing these siloed environments is critical. Gaining the knowledge of the full picture is the key, not looking to punish past transgressions.
It’s important to take the time necessary to thoroughly map out your multiple cloud environments (public, private, and on-prem). Rushing through this process could lead to missing critical elements. Only with complete discovery of all your cloud instances, applications, and workloads can you make informed decisions in the later stages to support all your current and future business needs.
Once you’ve mapped your existing cloud environments, the next step is to gain a clear understanding of the tools and technologies each silo (the design, build, and operating tools) is using. You may discover that different teams within the same cloud platform, such as AWS, are using distinct toolsets, applications, or management platforms.
For example, one department might be using a set of AWS-native tools for automation, while another uses third-party tools for the same purpose. Identifying these discrepancies and understanding their usage across teams will help in determining the best approach to standardize tools and workflows.
Some of the questions to ask when evaluating tools and technologies include: What does the business need to function? What will help us move to more self-service models? Does this tool deliver the business value we need across the organization? Do we truly need the specialized capabilities of this tool for just one or a few specific workloads?
Tools proliferate within an organization—especially across siloed environments—because different teams liked different features and procured what they needed for a specific purpose. Assume that all were chosen with the best of intentions and expect that some teams will be reluctant to let go of their prior choices. Regardless, the goal is to eliminate redundancy and ensure that all teams are aligned on the tools that will be used in the future hybrid multicloud setup to reduce complexity and cost and help simplify operations.
With a clear view of the cloud environments and tools currently in use, the next step is to make a decision about which environments, tools, and technologies will be standardized going forward. This can be a challenging step, as it may involve selecting one set of tools and platforms over others—which will require change for some or potentially everyone.
Many organizations are faced with a choice between a greenfield or brownfield strategy. A greenfield approach means starting fresh with new tools and technologies, whereas a brownfield approach involves working with existing tools and platforms, which can lead to more gradual change. In most cases, a greenfield approach is easier for employees to accept because it gets you to a final state quicker and can lend itself to helping people not feel so protective of the current brownfield as it changes. Starting with a clean slate, so to speak, can help reduce resistance to the change and help teams adapt more readily.
No matter what, however, organizational change management is critical during this phase. Leadership needs to be fully on board. Demonstrate to, and get buy-in from, executives on both the IT and business sides of the organization that this unified standard is what’s best for the company, the shareholders, and the employees. Sell it as a positive experience for every single layer within the organization. This requires effective internal marketing.
This internal marketing approach includes selling the unified standard to employees as well. You’ll need to be able to justify the reasons for the change and let them know how moving to a unified multicloud environment will make their jobs easier and more efficient. For instance, explain how a seamless hybrid multicloud model will enhance security. With the siloed environments, if something goes wrong, teams might have to assess dozens of tools to determine which ones presented the vulnerability. Say 15 of the tools have that vulnerability—that’s a lot of time and effort to remediate all of them. With hybrid multicloud, the single standard toolset can be identified quickly, the issue resolved, and the system up and running again right away.
One way to approach employees with the coming changes is to remind them how drastically the technology landscape has changed over the past decade, and how today’s tools and technologies are making seamless cloud operations easier and more attainable than they’ve ever been. For instance, there are now technologies that allow you to tap into bare metal instances in the public cloud environment. The next layers can now be more unified and technologies are available that allow you to have the same stack across all of your instances. Even though the hardware in every environment might not be exactly the same, the platform is presenting the same regardless of location—and that allows you to start adding tooling and technology on top of it all in a uniform way. Ultimately, this will enable your organization to realize that one design, build and operate vision.
Setting realistic expectations across the organization is also a critical part of this step. This journey is partly an exercise in endurance and it’s going to continue to evolve over time.
Before making decisions about which vendors and platforms to work with moving forward, assess all of your existing contractual obligations. Many organizations find themselves locked into multi-year agreements with specific cloud vendors. While it’s important not to disregard previous financial investments, these commitments shouldn’t hold back progress. To get to your desired hybrid multicloud end state, you might need to cut your losses with some vendors and consolidate with others.
It's easy to get stuck on the idea that you’ve invested X amount of dollars with a particular vendor over the past decade. The point now, though, is the future and identifying what products, solutions, and providers will get you where you want to be two years, five years, 10 years down the road. The important questions are: How do we want to position ourselves better for the future? And, where are we going to make the new investments?
Look for vendors who are aligned with your long-term goals and are capable of delivering the hybrid multicloud capabilities that will position you where you want to be. Some vendors get too focused on selling you their roadmap (features that are not really there yet), even if it’s not really what you want or need.
Transitioning from dozens of siloed environments to a single standardized setup takes time. This process will require gradual steps, where you first consolidate a set of environments and tools into a smaller pool before eventually narrowing them down to a single, unified standard.
It’s important to adopt a phased approach to this process. Start with the most critical environments and tools, and gradually phase out the others. This will ensure that the end state of hybrid multicloud can support all workloads. This will reduce disruption to your organization’s operations in the long term, while making the eventual transition to a unified multicloud system smoother.
Looking forward, adopting a “cloud-agnostic” strategy is essential to achieving maximum flexibility and agility. A cloud-agnostic approach allows you to move workloads and applications across different cloud providers based on performance, cost, and specific technological needs. This gives you the ability to take advantage of deals or features from one vendor or another, while still maintaining flexibility across the broader cloud ecosystem.
Your developers must design cloud-agnostically as well, so if leadership pivots to a specific cloud provider for specific reasons, for instance, it’s no problem and won’t cause any downtime.
Some cloud providers approach organizations with great deals or free services designed to get their business. That’s natural, but be wary of taking a sweet deal that locks you into that provider’s platform and tools. Carefully evaluate those incentive programs and ask yourself: Does this lead me down a path that gets me to my cloud-agnostic goal, or is this going to put me into a forced proprietary situation and reduce my ability to operate a true hybrid multicloud platform?
The only certainty in IT is change, and the best way to adapt is with extraordinary flexibility. That means making strategic investments now to ensure that you can meet future needs. With so many approvals and justifications required, the real question becomes: Why wouldn’t we take a cloud-agnostic approach?
Stay tuned for the next installment of our series on hybrid multicloud infrastructure where we’ll look at the benefits of hybrid multicloud for each level of the organization - from individual contributors to management and senior leadership.
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