| Table of Contents: |
| What is Hybrid Cloud Automation? |
| 8 Best Practices for Hybrid Cloud Automation |
| Impact of Hybrid Cloud Automation: Top 13 Use Cases |
| How Cloud4C Plays a Role in Hybrid Cloud Automation |
84% of organizations that have adopted cloud automation have seen an increase in revenue and reduction in operation costs! Sounds promising, right?
All hybrid cloud models incorporate workload portability, orchestration, and management across diverse environments. The challenge? Standardizing configuration and deployment across all clouds - public, private, and hybrid – or other associated IT landscapes through a consistent automation platform. Whether combining public clouds with private data centers, utilizing multiple public clouds, integrating bare-metal, virtual, and cloud resources, or managing cloud-native applications, maintaining third-party environments connected to the cloud core, automation emerges as the king pin.
This blog explores some best practices and compelling use cases for leveraging automation solutions in hybrid cloud, helping organizations manage disparate processes across the complex and distributed IT landscape through unified workflows and policies to utilize the full potential of the hybrid cloud strategy.
Before we explore the best practices, let us first understand -
What is Hybrid Cloud Automation?
According to experts, hybrid cloud automation acts as a "translator," seamlessly bridging on-premises and cloud deployments through code, enabling consistent service delivery regardless of resource location.
Simply put, hybrid cloud automation seamlessly integrates cloud automation technology across on-premises data centers, public and private clouds, as well as edge computing environments. For instance, configuring cloud servers, spinning up development resources, or setting up a network in the cloud, are all included under hybrid cloud automation.
Thinking of Moving to Hybrid Cloud: Here’s a Fool Proof Migration Checklist.
Top 8 Best Practices for Hybrid Cloud Automation
The true potential of hybrid cloud automation demands adhering to a set of proven best practices that foster agility, efficiency, and cost optimization. Here are Top 8 best practices for hybrid cloud automation:
Ensure Visibility into Data Management:
Organizations must implement processes and tools that provide a unified view of data across on-premises and cloud platforms. This includes data governance policies, data cataloging, and data lineage tracking. By ensuring visibility into data management, organizations can maintain compliance, improve data quality, and optimize data workflows across the hybrid cloud setup.
Enhance Capacity of On-premise Legacy Applications:
Organizations having critical legacy applications running on-premises may face capacity constraints or scalability challenges. Implementing cloudbursting techniques can dynamically scale on-premises applications to the public cloud when needed. This ensures efficient use of resources and reduces costs.
Embrace Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
By treating infrastructure provisioning and configuration as code, organizations gain the ability to version, test, and collaborate on infrastructure changes, just like they would with traditional software development. Adopting IaC practices, such as Terraform, ensures consistent and repeatable deployments across the hybrid cloud environment, minimizing human error and ensuring compliance with organizational standards.
Implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD):
Seamless integration of hybrid cloud automation with CI/CD pipelines is a crucial best practice. By automating the build, test, and deployment processes, organizations can accelerate the delivery of applications and infrastructure changes while maintaining high quality and reliability. For instance, tools like Azure DevOps enable organizations to automate the entire software delivery and underlying infra provisioning lifecycle, from code commit to production deployment, across the hybrid cloud environment.
Prioritize Security and Compliance:
Security and compliance should be at the forefront of the hybrid cloud automation strategy. Leveraging automation tools to enforce security policies, implementing least-privilege access controls, and maintaining audit trails across the hybrid environment are a must. Public cloud-native solutions like AWS Secrets Manager or Azure Key Vault can securely manage and distribute credentials and sensitive data, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches.
Optimize Cost Management:
Leveraging automation tools for cost monitoring, rightsizing, and resource scheduling can significantly optimize cloud spending. Automated cost analysis and optimization strategies here, ensure efficient resource utilization and cost-effective hybrid cloud operations.
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Guide on Hybrid Cloud. Read More
Establish Robust Monitoring and Logging:
Implement centralized logging and monitoring solutions that can aggregate and analyze data from both on-premises and cloud resources. Tools like Prometheus or Grafana can provide real-time insights into the health and performance of hybrid cloud workloads, enabling proactive issue resolution and optimizing resource utilization.
Promote Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing:
Effective hybrid cloud automation requires collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams. Establish standardized processes, documentation, and training programs to ensure consistent practices and a shared understanding of the automation tools and workflows. Encourage cross-functional collaboration between development, operations, and security teams to streamline the automation lifecycle and foster a DevOps culture within the organization.
Impact of Hybrid Cloud Automation: Top 13 Use Cases
1. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity:
By automating the replication and failover processes between on-premises and cloud environments, organizations can minimize downtime and data loss in the event of an outage or disaster. Tools like Azure Site Recovery, AWS CloudEndure, or VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery can orchestrate failover and failback, ensuring seamless business continuity.
For instance, a healthcare provider could leverage cloud-based automation to automatically failover critical patient data and applications to a secondary cloud region in the event of a natural disaster or cyber-attack, ensuring uninterrupted access to life-saving information and services.
To know more about Implementing Disaster Recovery in Hybrid Cloud Environments Read More !
2. Multi-Cloud Resource Management:
As organizations extend to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, leveraging services from multiple public cloud providers, hybrid cloud automation becomes essential for consistent and efficient resource management. By leveraging cloud-agnostic automation tools like Terraform, organizations can provision, configure, and manage resources across different cloud platforms, reducing vendor lock-in and enabling seamless workload portability.
A global e-commerce company, for example, can leverage hybrid cloud automation to deploy and manage its web applications across multiple public cloud providers, ensuring high availability and low latency for customers worldwide while maintaining a consistent operational model and governance across all cloud environments.
Confused between Hybrid Cloud or Multi Cloud, and Which Suits You Best? Read More
3. Global Content Delivery Network (CDN):
Hybrid cloud automation can enable organizations to manage and scale the CDN infrastructure seamlessly across multiple cloud providers and on-premises data centers. This allows for efficient content caching, load balancing, and high-performance delivery of web content, videos, and other media to users globally.
4. Big Data Analytics:
Hybrid cloud automation orchestrates big data analytics platforms that span on-premises data centers and cloud environments. It automates data ingestion, processing, and analysis across diverse data sources, ensuring compliance and enabling real-time insights for data-driven decision-making.
5. AI/ML Model Training and Deployment:
Hybrid cloud automation enables the training and deployment of machine learning models across on-premises GPU clusters and cloud-based AI platforms. This approach optimizes resource utilization, accelerates model iterations, and enables seamless integration with production applications.
6. Hybrid Cloud Application Modernization:
Organizations can leverage hybrid cloud automation to modernize monolithic applications by containerizing and deploying microservices across on-premises and cloud environments. This enables scalability, resilience, and faster time-to-market for new features and updates.
7. Hybrid Cloud Cost Optimization:
Hybrid cloud automation can play a crucial role in optimizing costs and maximizing resource utilization across on-premises and public cloud infrastructures. By automating resource provisioning, scaling, and deprovisioning based on real-time demand, organizations can avoid over-provisioning and minimize waste, resulting in significant cost savings.
For instance, a media streaming company could leverage cloud-based automation to automatically provision additional cloud resources during peak viewing hours, such as live sporting events or popular show releases, and scale down resources during off-peak times, optimizing costs while ensuring a seamless viewing experience for their customers.
Read More
8. Hybrid Cloud DevOps:
Organizations can utilize hybrid cloud automation techniques to orchestrate DevOps workflows, including continuous integration, testing, and deployment pipelines across on-premises infrastructure and cloud platforms. This enables faster software delivery, consistent environments, and improved collaboration between development and operations teams.
9. High-Performance Computing (HPC):
Hybrid cloud automation manages HPC infrastructure, including on-premises supercomputing clusters and cloud-based burst capacity for computationally intensive simulations, modeling, and complex calculations. This approach optimizes resource utilization and accelerates time-to-results.
10. IoT Data Processing and Analytics:
Hybrid cloud automation manages IoT infrastructure, including edge devices, on-premises gateways, and cloud-based data processing and analytics platforms. This enables real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and optimization of industrial processes or smart systems.
11. Data Compliance Management & Data Governance Processes:
In a hybrid cloud setup, data resides across on-premises and multiple cloud platforms, making data governance and compliance management challenging. Cloud automation simplifies this by helping automate data discovery, classification, and cataloging processes. Additionally, automation aids data lineage tracking, access controls, and data lifecycle management.
12. Compliance Monitoring & Audit Reporting:
Regulatory compliance audits involve the collection and analysis of logs, configurations, and security events from multiple sources. Hybrid cloud automation here, takes the centralized approach to facilitate real-time compliance monitoring, automated report generation, and proactive alerting for potential compliance violations. Automatically collecting and presenting the required evidence further reduces the manual efforts and ensures audit-readiness.
13. Automated Policy Management & Policy Governance:
Hybrid cloud automation helps organizations define and centrally manage policies through code (Infrastructure as Code or Policy as Code, for instance). These policies can be automatically deployed and enforced across on-premises and cloud resources, ensuring consistent configurations and reducing misconfigurations.
Hybrid Cloud Potential with Cloud4C's Automation Expertise
Automation has emerged as a foundational technology, proving invaluable in addressing the challenges of scalability, complexity, and speed that initially arose in the public cloud but have now spread across all IT domains. In that light, enterprises are turning to hybrid cloud. However, the true potential of these hybrid environments can only be realized through the power of automation.
Recognizing this pivotal need, Cloud4C, a global cloud services provider, has successfully implemented hybrid cloud solutions for over 60 enterprises across 25 countries. With an extensive expertise developed through partnerships with industry giants like AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, we offer a flexible approach to hybrid cloud automation. From speeding up DevOps pipelines and ensuring consistent deployments to optimizing costs with smart workload distribution, Cloud4C’s tailored automation services meet the diverse needs of modern enterprises. Cloud4C also offers hyperautomation services to help enterprises achieve end-to-end process automation across multiple landscapes, platforms, and data pipelines using technologies like RPA, AI, ML, and analytics.
Additionally, by integrating our SHOPTM with our hybrid cloud services, businesses can achieve end-to-end cloud migration, modernization, and managed services with minimal human intervention from a single pane of glass, ensuring seamless operations and improved efficiency.
