How do you evaluate the success and impact of your hybrid cloud initiatives?

The top three benefits of a hybrid cloud environment are flexibility, scalability, and resilience. It offers the ability to leverage both on-premises infrastructure and public cloud services, providing flexibility to match workload requirements. Hybrid cloud enables scalability by allowing organizations to dynamically allocate resources based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency. Additionally, it enhances resilience by offering redundancy and failover capabilities across multiple environments, minimizing downtime and improving business continuity.

While I concur that employing hybrid clouds can enable orgs. to maintain ownership over their crucial data, I dissent from the notion that this approach would boost innovation, efficiency, or agility. Implementation of hybrid clouds would compel organizations to maintain numerous tool sets to monitor their environments, expose them to security threats by introducing complexity, and incur additional costs by having multiple ops teams responsible for managing both on-prem and cloud environments. I believe that most of the agility and scalability that a public cloud could offer to orgs. would be sacrificed because they would need to operate at the same pace as the legacy environments to ensure both public/private clouds remain in sync.

One of the key ways I've seen hybrid cloud utilized is as a foot-in-the-door hedge for cautious/slow moving organization curious about how a full cloud adoption could benefit, or hurt, their medium to long term objectives. A step-wise approach that makes use of interim hybrid cloud infrastructure to bridge the gap between classic on-prem and cloud-native operations can be a compelling argument that offsets some of the sunk cost and cloud skepticism arguments. Likewise, operating hybrid can allow cost-sensitive organizations to extract maximum benefit out of existing physical infrastructure, or avoid future hardware purchases, by leveraging capacity bursting (often seamlessly) into the cloud.

I would also add there is a potential opportunity cost to not embracing a cloud-first architecture. On-prem systems and applications are never going to evolve at the rate the cloud does. Having immediate access to cutting edge technologies, hardware, and proximity to collaboration will always give organizations in the cloud a distinct market advantage. If your ability to adapt to change is even partially tied to a on-prem lifecycle, you will always be at a disadvantage. Plus, ya know, operational durability. Hybrid means you have two or more potential sources for cascading failures!

Key challenges of a hybrid cloud environment include data security, integration complexities, latency issues, management and orchestration difficulties, cost management, vendor lock-in risks, performance concerns, and skills shortages.

Here's my take: - Address Complexity: Hybrid cloud brought increased complexity. We focused on thorough planning and coordination to manage this. ??? - Optimize Costs: To avoid higher costs, we meticulously designed and optimized our architecture. This helped prevent duplicate resources and minimized data transfer fees. ?? - Ensure Security: We put strong security measures in place to protect against data breaches and cyberattacks, ensuring compliance at all levels. ?? - Measure Performance: We tracked key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure efficiency and effectiveness, adjusting our approach as needed. ?? - Gather Feedback: We regularly gathered feedback from stakeholders to understand the impact and make continuous improvements. ??

- ?? Define clear, measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) based on your initial business objectives for moving to a hybrid cloud. Common KPIs include cost savings, operational efficiency, and system performance metrics such as uptime and response time. - ?? Conduct regular reviews and audits of your hybrid cloud environment is essential. - ?? Leverage analytics tools provided by cloud service providers or third-party solutions that can monitor and report on the efficiency, security, and cost-effectiveness of your hybrid cloud operations. - Continuously collecting feedback from end-users and stakeholders can also be crucial.

It should also be critical to assess and thoroughly plan how cloud or hybrid operations affects data/metadata/algorithm governance and lifecycle. Having multiple copies or versions in heterogenous architectures likely means maintaining multiple tracking systems or reconciling disjoint provenance.

Here are my top metrics for determining if the initiative is a success: Technical Performance: Use metrics such as uptime, availability, latency, and throughput. Cost Optimization: Compare actual expenditure against budgeted costs and projected savings. Scalability and Agility: Monitor the ability to scale resources up or down in response to changing demand. Business Impact: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to revenue generation, customer satisfaction, market share, and competitive advantage. Security and Compliance: Monitor security incidents, vulnerabilities, and compliance violations to ensure that data and applications are adequately protected and regulatory requirements are met.

Along with innovation, there could be value in gauging soft metrics that represent how hybrid/cloud operations affect engineering, operations, or support staff. Did it make their jobs easier, harder, more satisfying, more complex.