Hybrid Cloud: As the industry matures, think big, start small, scale fast

The number one complaint we hear from customers is their struggle to run tomorrow’s workloads on yesterday’s infrastructure. With a lot of new technologies coming to the forefront—containers, microservices, and so on—modern workloads are significantly different than even three or four years ago. They’re now distributed across multiple footprints, and organizations are struggling to keep pace.

At many companies, IT and lines of business now have more equal footing in determining what infrastructure to run their business on. Infrastructure is no longer just being considered through a technical lens (is it secure?) but also through a business one. Is it agile enough to support new processes, people, and business drivers? Does it have the flexibility to let developers spin out new applications to internal and external audiences quickly and move workloads to where they are best suited, without penalty?

The advantage of hybrid cloud

As customers ponder this dilemma, we’re constantly innovating to help them in their open, hybrid cloud journeys. We’ve witnessed how our customers’ business agility has dramatically improved with the use open hybrid clouds.

An open, hybrid cloud not only provides the infrastructure organizations need to support business goals, but offers the best of both worlds by providing the infrastructure to run diverse workloads in different locations depending on business need—making business leaders happy—without sacrificing security features and other things that IT cares about.

By being able to move workloads seamlessly to one or more private or public clouds, they have the flexibility they need to choose the right infrastructure for the right workload. That brings increased agility to the business without compromising cost or efficiency.

Bridging the gap between public and private cloud

This hasn’t happened overnight, of course. And it is still evolving. The adoption of open hybrid cloud and the maturity of user organizations are interrelated. A lack of IT maturity, IT skills, and entrenched legacy systems have slowed organizations from moving to an open hybrid cloud strategy. Many still run on-premise clouds, and have silos on public clouds, and it is difficult to connect the two together. Now, organizations have the tools and technologies like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to bridge the two in a generally seamless fashion.

Still, challenges remain. For many organizations that chose a proprietary private cloud, they’re now realizing the road to success that is best suited to them is through open solutions. They need freedom, without penalty, to rewrite applications or do things differently so they can more easily move to a different cloud model.

They’re also struggling with corralling their newfound flexibility, understanding which applications should run on which cloud, and doing it all in a synchronized fashion. Open hybrid cloud gives organizations the ability to move workloads to where they’re best suited - without disruption to end users - and with the Red Hat platform underneath it all they can do so more seamlessly. Education is key.

Applying agile to hybrid cloud

We’ve seen how the benefits of adopting open hybrid cloud can far outweigh the challenges, so I have six words of advice while going down this path: Think big, start small, scale fast. Don’t look at one single silo and think that’s where you need to be. Think about your IT organization’s strategic initiatives for the next few years and pick one initiative that can act as a prototype. Be successful at it, don’t look back, and keep scaling workloads.