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Building a Resilient Hybrid Multicloud Infrastructure

As the IT industry becomes increasingly complex, businesses need a solution that enables sufficient scalability and flexibility to achieve difficult goals. Projections from The Insight Partners show that the multicloud management market will grow to $33.48 billion by 2028.

The data suggests a growing trend among organzations, with many now embracing multicloud solutions. However, while this approach offers promise, it’s crucial to recognize a critical distinction: the future of IT lies not solely on multicloud but in a resilient hybrid multicloud.

Key Takeaways:

A resilient hybrid multicloud is one that can guarantee the continued running of applications regardless of failures, outages, or attacks.
Implementing penetration testing, firewalls, and other security measures as part of the infrastructure design process can yield a strong foundation of resiliency.
Being resilient not only means accounting for data protection but also backup and disaster recovery in the event of an unpreventable incident.

The hybrid multicloud is making a strong transition from being a fringe option in the cloud computing space toward being the de facto cloud operating model of choice for many organizations. As this option becomes more mainstream, though, IT decision-makers must understand how to build a resilient multicloud environment.

What is hybrid multicloud infrastructure?

Hybrid multicloud infrastructure is an approach that entails combining on-premises operations with multiple public clouds, i.e. the combination of hybrid cloud and multicloud but with a common operating model.

The benefits of adopting a hybrid multicloud model include freedom from propriety, data sovereignty compliance, and the ability to move workloads between clouds as costs and business goals change. While these benefits of operating in the hybrid multicloud can certainly be game-changing for the enterprise, a lack of resiliency makes it difficult to realize the cloud’s full potential.

Resiliency in the cloud refers to the infrastructure’s ability to keep applications running regardless of any failures in the underlying hardware or software. Such failures may be the result of malicious cyberattacks or even uncontrollable natural disasters.

By building a resilient cloud infrastructure, organizations can improve business continuity and reduce costly losses that might otherwise occur as a result of unavoidable downtime.

Design the infrastructure with security in mind

When building hybrid multicloud infrastructure, IT teams must ensure that security is an inherent part of the design by embracing processes such as penetration testing. This entails simulating how the infrastructure will hold up against a real attack, and this type of testing goes hand-in-hand with other similar measures, including vulnerability scans and attack surface analysis.

It is possible for admins to proactively protect workloads with identity access management policies, external and internal firewalls, and intrusion detection/prevention systems. These measures can integrate into the infrastructure post-launch, but a thorough strategy will account for them as early as possible.

There are, of course, also cloud-specific risks to consider when building resiliency into a hybrid multicloud infrastructure. There should be plans in place ahead of time regarding how best to remediate these types of risks, which involves assessing how downtime will affect the business if workloads do experience an outage.

Companies can even gain visibility into network traffic with practices such as traffic analysis. These visibility and observation measures ensure that teams will always be aware when an outage or attack occurs and can respond appropriately.

Allow for quick recovery when disaster strikes

While the mention of resiliency might first bring to mind the idea of protecting data from harm outright, the reality is that resiliency in hybrid multicloud infrastructure also refers to its backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

The backup phase of a resiliency plan is a proactive measure ensuring that the company can continue operations even after the loss or damage of data. By cloning data, taking snapshots, or generating replications to separate locations, the organization guarantees that mission-critical information will remain intact even if one location suffers an outage.

Even with backups in place, though, a disaster recovery plan remains essential. Systems affected by an attack must return to their full operational capacity, and the company has an obligation to act accordingly if malicious individuals claim sensitive customer data.

The process of building a thorough disaster recovery strategy entails establishing specific recovery time and recovery point objectives, as well as ensuring compliance with service level agreements. The presence of backups and infrastructure-wide snapshots can accelerate the recovery process and aid in meeting critical objectives.

IT leaders must keep in mind, however, that a successful business will continue to grow and that a disaster recovery plan must grow with it. A scalable backup and disaster recovery solution is essential in granting peace of mind to internal and external parties that the company will succeed in quickly recovering when a disaster inevitably occurs.

Hybrid multicloud infrastructure with built-in resilience

Resiliency in hybrid multicloud infrastructure is ultimately a matter of accounting for data protection, data backup, and disaster recovery in the infrastructure planning phase. An organization building a hybrid multicloud environment from scratch must carefully consider how it will satisfy these resiliency needs, but a simpler solution is to adopt a third-party infrastructure with resiliency measures already in place.

Building a hybrid multicloud presence on Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) guarantees that resiliency is an inherent attribute of the enterprise IT environment. Nutanix Disaster Recovery on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is a comprehensive and flexible DR solution that allows for the replication of data to both on-premises and cloud-based locations, all with easy one-click simplicity.

Operating in a hybrid multicloud infrastructure grants unparalleled flexibility and scalability to the enterprise but creates increased underlying complexity. A cloud platform that makes navigating that complexity easier and even simplifies the essential process of disaster recovery is one that businesses can truly rely on to be resilient.

Learn more about building a private cloud for resiliency as well as how cloud-based workloads can be more resilient.

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