Behind Every Cloud is Another Cloud

Said Judy Garland circa 1950. I’m pretty sure she was not referring to our current cloud landscape of public, private, multi-, edge, and hybrid-clouds. Yet she was spot on! Many organizations are using the cloud as the foundation for their digital transformation journey. We also see that most of our clients are starting to operate across multiple public and private clouds and are accelerating their journey towards a hybrid cloud ecosystem. 

In this hybrid ecosystem, we see three patterns emerging – first, some are going the cloud-native way, deeper into the cloud stack; next, some are going the cloud-neutral way to avoid any lock-in; and finally, some are strategically using a combination of cloud-native and cloud-neutral approaches based on the nature of the workloads. These choices are driven mainly by capability, speed, compatibility, cost, and compliance. 

As the volume and variety of workloads across the hybrid cloud ecosystem increase, the complexity to build, operate, manage, and govern is also increasing, and the need for a simplified way to orchestrate and manage the hybrid cloud ecosystem is emerging as a critical service.  

At Infosys, we have been building and implementing a Polycloud platform for our hybrid cloud environment for several clients. Our approach allows enterprises to operate across multiple public/private clouds in a secure, consistent, and compliant manner while enabling their cloud-native or cloud-neutral strategies and providing them with more strategic choices. We facilitate AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, IBM Cloud, and other private cloud providers to operate within the enterprise concurrently to ensure enhanced flexibility, availability, user experiences – all of which are essential to meet the digital transformation goal of any organization. The services we offer include: 

Smart catalog. The platform provides a dynamic Decision Support Framework, enabling enterprises to choose the right set of services from the right cloud vendor(s) in line with their business and workload requirements. It comes with a set of architectural blueprints and patterns to build, deploy, and manage workloads across the clouds by choosing the right services

Smart brokerage. Business requirements are continually changing; through our smart brokerage, Infosys offers best-negotiated prices to our customers to help them pick relevant services from the cloud service providers. Enterprises are not bound to any cloud service vendor or pricing.

Developer empowerment. The platform empowers full stack developers by providing self-service models for provisioning, deployment, and operation of services across the hybrid cloud ecosystem. Enterprises are provided with an intuitive portal and API interfaces to provision the services and avail the 360-degree dashboard to monitor end-to-end service operations. The portal enables enterprises to keep a check on any widespread outage or security vulnerability.

Governance. The platform offers an embedded governance framework ensuring compliance with all security-related requirements, financial governance to ensure operations do not exceed the allocated budgets; and, technical governance so that the authorized users consume the right set of services. 

Observability. An all-in-one dashboard consolidates events, alerts, metrics, and logs across environments to enable transparent and faster resolution of operational issues. Additionally, it allows a view into the right deployment zone for the corresponding workload through the smart brokerage module.

Autonomics. An AI-powered core dramatically improves operational efficiency by automating operational tasks, improving issue detection, and providing automated resolutions. It accelerates IT decision-making and time-to-market of applications by automating common IT functions and improving overall service quality and application resiliency.

Ops Analytics. You can sift through vast amounts of operational data through an easy-to-use workbench for advanced data analysis. This workbench provides pre-built data pipelines for pattern detection, intent extraction and classification, anomaly detection, forecasting, event priority, and correlation analyzer and root cause analysis allowing rapid ML model development and model servicing.

In short, our platform enables enterprises to procure, build, and manage vendor-agnostic solutions across multiple hybrid cloud providers while providing the flexibility to port their platform and data from one provider to another -- instituting a culture of building and running applications in a portable cloud-agnostic way by facilitating portability across cloud providers. Please check out this link for more details