How the Hybrid Cloud is Working for Businesses

Tony Sandberg, Regional Director, APAC, Kemp

Tony Sandberg, Regional Director, APAC, Kemp

Cloud migration and cloud adoption presents some interesting opportunities for organizations with complex needs. For those who didn’t start in the cloud as cloud-native, hybrid cloud certainly should be the next or first step. Whole scale cloud migration just isn’t an option for everyone – there are regulatory, privacy, architectural, infrastructural, and other challenges that need to be met. Not every application can be modified and, in many cases, applications that are working perfectly and the barriers to redevelopment can impact time, cost-to-benefit, and ROI.

APAC firms are adopting hybrid cloud and finding themselves simultaneously in a multi-cloud environment to serve their staff and customers. However, such transitions aren’t necessarily a result of following a strategic plan. Applications that are deployed on a best-case scenario and different cloud providers are selected for different capabilities, which presents a challenge even for the best skilled IT teams, and can be a nightmare to ensure the same business continuity across an array of dissimilar environments.

Forrester predicted that 2019 is the year of enterprise cloud spending as APAC businesses can no longer avoid modernizing their core business applications. Similarly, Gartner also predicted that 2020 would see 75percent of organizations deploying a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud infrastructure model. It’s less about convincing enterprises on why they need a hybrid model and more about them discovering themselves in an already hybrid world.

User needs shifts focus to application experience

Migrating from existing infrastructure to a multi-cloud strategy is one of many challenges facing IT teams across Asia Pacific today. Some of the most common user concerns we’ve seen involve balancing agile, scalable deployments with stability and usability, managing compliancy with rapidly-evolving data regulations. IT administrators and their management also want to know that they have the access and capability to fully manage their applications wherever they may be deployed, which can be to varying degrees across the cloud providers.

Migrating from existing infrastructure to a multi-cloud strategy is one of many challenges facing it teams across asia pacific today

One top IT infrastructure priority is ensuring that their applications are always in an optimal state, which is often expressed as a factor of speed. Being fast is especially important since on-site consumer transactions can fall by 20percent because of a slow or bad application experience. On mobile devices, more than half of its users would abandon a web app if they take more than three seconds to load. If you just glance across your office and see the time spent by employees waiting for workplace apps to load, you can see in real time how this results in lost productivity which can just accumulate over the months and years.

At a macro level, these expectations are about reducing friction between the user and their applications. An ideal application experience for an application owner is one that feels invisible: its easy to access, easy to manage, always optimized and properly provisioned for.

Intelligence we’ve gathered from over 60,000 global application deployments indicate that as much as 48percent of organizations see as many as nine incidents per week resulting in application outages. If we want to create the ideal application experience in the multi-cloud, we will need to create an application delivery service that:

• Speeds up the deployment process

• Is easy to manage and root cause

• Provides flexibility in operational cost and provisioning of IT needs

• Has a resilient business continuity

Avoiding Vendor lock-in

A new phrase is popping up that is clouding the migration discussion – “repatriation” – a term that means returning an application that was once cloud-based and returning it to a non-cloud base – e.g. a data center, color, or on-premises environment. Many are finding that scaling costs can be difficult to wind back or that as an application’s usage wanes, it becomes more cost effective and having a lot of dedicated, scalable infrastructure just isn’t warranted.

By using a pay-as-you-go metered license model, it helps to control operational cost since the firm only pays for the load consumed, instead of over- or under-provisioning resources. Such IT spending would match your business rhythm based on its online traffic, and it frees up the cashflow for other business needs.

Another challenge for most IT administrators is their vendor’s preference for locking users into their own environments. For example, ZK Research found from a survey conducted with the CIO’s and IT Directors with 1,000 enterprise survey respondents, a staggering 70percent wanted to replace their current load-balancer vendor, citing vendor lock-in, pricing, and unnecessary complexity as key reasons. Fortunately, we are seeing more load-balancers supporting cross-platform and cross-brand compatibility. However, if we genuinely want to help more businesses successfully incorporate multi-cloud solutions for businesses, we need to put the application experience at the forefront, and to ensure that the incoming hybrid cloud rollout is well-met in Asia.