Top 3 Imperatives for Your Cloud Strategy

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service is increasingly enabling enterprises to accelerate innovation while reducing cost of doing business. However, to take full advantage of the cost benefits enabled by cloud, there are 3 key imperatives you might want to consider as a part of your Cloud strategy in 2016.

Management:

Moving to Cloud platform shouldn’t burden IT leaders with management complexities. A careful evaluation of capabilities that deliver’s a True Hybrid cloud experience is imperative in driving cost savings. Some factors to keep in mind in selecting your cloud platform include: 

1.Seamless migration of application with capabilities to extend network environments. One of the ways of achieving this is by using replication based migration which also helps minimize downtime.

2.Managing the proliferation of devices to connect securely without routing through a VPN gateway and authenticating users through single sign on. 

 3.Extending network capabilities with ease that scale over hundreds of network segments to the cloud over a single WAN

Security and Compliance:

This by far is one of the most critical considerations for IT departments. Having an ability to take advantage of the cloud benefits without compromising on on- premise level security and compliance is imperative. True Hybrid clouds should enable enterprises to seamlessly extend data-center level security and compliance policies to the cloud. Following capabilities are critical to be evaluated in selecting your cloud platform:

1.Portability of granular policies and control by embedding existing security controls into workloads. Having capabilities to replicate existing networking constructs reflecting on-premise policies and controls reduces risk and creates scalable protection.

2.Micro-segmentation based security policies enabling flexibility of public cloud with enterprise grade on premise security policies. Network capabilities that can be implemented in multi-tier distributed firewalls and applied automatically to new workloads reduce risk while streamlining application deployment.

3.Extending network security capabilities through virtual network interfaces allowing IT to move on premise apps “as is” to their public cloud without having to re-architect. True Hybrid cloud delivers these capabilities of replicating the entire network, no matter how complex the on-premise network topologies may have been implemented.

Enabling Self Services:

As enterprise IT strives to be agile and responsive to business needs, a key past that strategy is to enable Infrastructure to be self serviced. This strategy not only helps end users but also lets IT focus on strategic priorities by re-purposing resources which were serving end user requirements.

For an Infrastructure to become self served, it should have the following capabilities:

Automation: Adopting self service catalogs to empower end users access resources based on set policies is a good example of automation. For developers, self provisioning of resources to perform such as Development and Testing without go through IT is also a representation of automation.

Collaboration : Forward looking companies are on a fast track to embrace DevOps. A true hybrid cloud infrastructure extends automation and enables collaboration between Developers and Operations through a high level of autonomy without changing the current processes. It builds upon an existing automation process deployed by customers and extends it.

Integration: A self service platform should also ensure the user productivity is not impacted due to new learning curves and configuration challenges. An open and Integrated cloud platform will have customers not only leverage existing process but also extend them with new tools and frameworks. Having an ability to bring all exiting tools such as Chef, Puppet, Saltstack, Ansible etc. would be imperative for IT to enable Infrastructure as a code based on self-service.

Best,

Nitin Saxena

@nitisaxe