How to Design Your Hybrid IT Environment Based on Your Application Needs
Hybrid IT is a great use case for letting the workload determine the infrastructure. With hybrid IT, you are looking to contain costs, while enabling digital transformation with legacy IT assets; perhaps those legacy IT infrastructure host applications that would be painful or unproductive to re-platform. A common example is legacy open systems platforms like pSeries and iSeries from IBM. There are still a lot of AS/400s out there, particularly in manufacturing and shipping, running their ERP platforms. Clients in these spaces want out of the data center business. But how do you enable this?
When many organizations think cloud, they automatically think AWS, or maybe Azure. But if the workload is designed on a more traditional multi-tier architecture, with isolated security subnets for the relational database and the web and app tier, building this in a hyperscale environment may result in costs way more than what the simple price calculator would lead the client to believe.
Some workloads shouldn’t be refactored at all. They may be better redeployed into a managed colocation environment where lower costs of hosting and cooling and power can be enjoyed, freeing organizations up from maintaining legacy infrastructure from a patching and security hardening perspective. This is the managed services component that comes into play in choosing a Cloud Managed Services provider. There’s even a name for this in the industry – the Boomerang Effect, where companies are realizing their push into the hyperscale was ill-advised for a particular workload and are pulling it back into a hosted private cloud or colocation environment.
Picking the right cloud is critical to the success of your digital transformation and hybrid IT strategy. You need a partner with a large cloud portfolio and a fully recoverable production-ready cloud services design, who will work with you to get to that right answer, using your workloads to guide recommendations. Flexential has the expertise and products to help customers on their cloud journey, providing cloud transformation consulting expertise, migration consulting and a full portfolio of cloud offerings that span the entire private to public spectrum, from dedicated hosted private cloud to managed services for public hyperscale clouds.