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For organizations that use public cloud services, the biggest goal is to optimize the usage and spend of those services. It all comes back to cost management and control–it’s all too easy to lose control of your cloud spend, especially when you don’t know who is spinning up more servers or whether they’re being used in the most cost-effective way. CIOs are experimenting with server tagging as a way to overcome this challenge. What is server tagging? Essentially, it’s creating a name and a value for each VM you have in your cloud environment. Examples of server tagging include by geographic region, department, application, server role (web server, database) or environment (production, QA). You can assign multiple tags if you wish to further specify who is using which servers (but note that this is not always possible). You can also set up rules to tag servers within a timely fashion or destroy them otherwise, eliminating the risk that tags won’t be implemented. With the information gathered from server tags, you can develop more meaningful financial and usage reports to present to your boss or board of directors. Why server tagging Server tagging is important because it gives you back control over…
In today’s modern IT world, whether you have a new project, line of business, or a newer version of an existing product line, you’ll need to scale, and scale quickly. More organizations have been turning to hybrid cloud to do that, and the market reflects that–according to RightScale, hybrid cloud is the preferred strategy for enterprises. Why is the hybrid cloud the best way to scale your environment? A public cloud delivers resources over the internet instead of being tied to hardware, which means it’s easy to grow virtual servers. This all sounds simple, but there are a few challenges that can prevent you from scaling properly and reaching your business goals. These include talent acquisition, difficulty with the platform, surprising billing, or a public cloud outage, all of which can lead to serious problems for public cloud users. How does hybrid scale differently? But hybrid cloud provides the scalability most businesses seek by integrating public cloud resources with an organization’s existing infrastructure, so they can provide new capabilities to their end user while reducing costs even more. Essentially, hybrid cloud solutions give organizations unlimited resources on demand while maximizing their existing infrastructure investments. Businesses like the flexibility behind the…
According to RightScale, lack of resources/expertise was cited as the No. 1 challenge in enterprise cloud adoption, with 32 percent of those surveyed naming it as their biggest concern. While that number fell in 2017, resources (or lack thereof) still remain a high priority for organizations looking to move to the cloud or who are already using it. If you’re experiencing rapid growth or a need to become more agile, you’re probably looking at the public cloud or already in it. But do you have the experts you need to manage it for you? As you know, the cloud offers many benefits, including increased efficiency and growth, coupled with decreased maintenance and CAPEX spending. A hybrid cloud furthers those benefits by giving you the added ability to place your workloads where they fit best. This could be in a public or private cloud, a data center, or even a bare metal server. Determining which applications and where all of their components (databases, dev environments, etc.) belong can be tricky though, as well as finding people properly trained in public and private cloud architecture, so it’s critical that you have a solution that lowers your costs instead of adding to them. Does your current provider offer…
Part of the cloud’s blessing and curse is your monthly cloud bill. It can either be amazingly cheap, or amazingly expensive. For most organizations, it’s hard to truly take advantage of the efficiency of cloud if they don’t know what their bill will be from month to month. According to Rightscale’s State of the Cloud report for 2017, the most cited challenge among mature cloud users was managing cloud costs. So what can you do to control this? The right provider matters It boils back down to finding the right cloud service provider. Should you choose to manage your cloud yourself, you’ll want a solid internal support team and be prepared to pay extra for external support. If you choose a managed service provider, look for one who can provide direct support and expertise when it comes time to analyze your bill. In the case of hybrid cloud, we’re talking about multiple clouds and potential multiple providers, what with combining your public cloud services with either a private cloud or legacy IT solution. For this, a cloud aggregator may prove helpful. Remember, a cloud aggregator is someone who negotiates and distributes cloud services from vendors in an effort to be as cost effective…
According to a recent Gartner report, nearly half of large enterprises will deploy hybrid cloud environments by the end of this year. That level of growth is super exciting for the cloud, as more organizations take advantage of a digital-based strategy. However, despite the maturity of the cloud, many CIOs still express concerns. There are two major challenges organizations face in a hybrid cloud environment (or any environment, really.) One is security, which we’ve covered. The other? Compliance. We talked about it a little in our hybrid cloud security post, but we’ll go into more detail about its importance and how you can achieve compliance in a hybrid environment. In the olden days of public cloud, there was a serious challenge to properly securing sensitive data, particularly PHI. Those who had to follow regulation guidelines, especially the healthcare industry, had a healthy amount of skepticism around jumping on the cloud bandwagon right away, and rightfully so. If you wanted to move to the cloud, you had to develop your own entirely private cloud, which was more expensive and harder to scale than public cloud. Compliance in the public cloud was very difficult—the onus was on the customer to ensure not only…
One of the biggest concerns around hybrid cloud for organizations is data security. According to Gartner, 38 percent of companies who don’t plan to use public cloud cited security and privacy as the main reasons. It’s very logical (and necessary) to ask how the cloud will protect your most valuable asset – your data. What are the biggest security challenges in hybrid cloud adoption? According to experts, the biggest security concerns in a hybrid environment are compliance, lack of encryption, poor SLAs, data redundancy, and data privacy and visibility. Some clouds are more equipped to handle these challenges than others, and it’s important to make sure you have the cloud that addresses your needs best. Let’s look at the above barriers and see how they can be addressed. Compliance: Whether your data is moving from cloud to cloud or a cloud to a physical server, it’s critical that you and your cloud service provider (whether that’s you or someone else) have the correct controls in place. This is especially important in today’s mobile world and BYOD. What should you do? Make sure your provider can pass third-party audits as part of a standard check for regulatory compliance. But remember, just because…
According to a recent UBS Evidence Lab study, 60 percent of IT administrators and CIOs surveyed agreed that hybrid solutions make the most sense. And data from a recent Synergy report said that spending on private and hybrid cloud services is growing at 45 percent per year. With a fully managed hybrid cloud, companies get all the benefits without the challenges and stress of maintaining it themselves. Below are a few reasons why multi-cloud strategies are becoming so popular. Core benefits of moving to a hybrid cloud A hybrid solution gives you the ability to divide up your application into different parts (such as containers) and put them where they run best, essentially scaling your resources in the most appropriate way for them. For example, if you need a low latency, high performance application, a private cloud might be your best choice. If you need to test your application or are running a program with varying peaks in demand, it might be better supported in the public cloud. No matter which cloud you’re in, if you have the right partner, you don’t have to worry about the hardware and can avoid an expensive hardware refresh and the CAPEX associated with…
Like any major decision (buying a house, choosing a pet, changing careers), certain considerations need to be made. In IT, moving to hybrid cloud is no exception to this rule. If you’re considering adopting a multi-cloud strategy, here are some important questions to put on your to-do list: The most important consideration is your migration/onramp strategy. More specifically, what is it? This question might sound vague, but it’s very important. What’s your scaling model look like? Do you have backup in case of failure during the migration? What about disaster recovery? Coming up with a detailed plan of attack will make the rest of your considerations easy to manage or solve. Managing your strategy: How will you take charge of your new hybrid cloud environment? Once you’ve come up with your strategy, it’s time to take control of it. Whether you’re managing it yourself or considering a managed hybrid cloud provider, you’ll want to make sure either they or you can answer the following questions. Billing management: Hybrid cloud offers great opportunities to reduce your IT costs, but there’s also the danger of losing control of your spend. Let’s go back to a question in the first consideration: What’s your scaling…
Virtual private clouds are a hot ticket these days—everyone wants them. We know they aren’t the same as a fully private cloud. But do the differences extend to security, too? Let’s start by reviewing the differences between private and virtual private clouds. If you want your environment completely dedicated to you and to own everything, a private cloud is for you. The equipment will be on a site or data center you own, so you have total control over your infrastructure. If you want that control but don’t want to worry about the hassle of infrastructure hosting, management and maintenance, then a hosted private cloud is for you. Security in a virtual private cloud In a private cloud, resources are distributed across multiple physical servers. This allows for redundancy in equipment and gives you a smooth transition in the event of a hardware failure. With a virtual private cloud, you don’t have to worry about the infrastructure, but it is not yours alone. Instead, you have an isolated patch of cloud on hardware shared with other users. When you configure a private IP subnet, VLAN and VPN, your organization has in effect created a private cloud and can access the environment…
You already know that there are three major types of clouds: Public, Private and Hybrid. Now, there’s a newer player in the game: Virtual Private Clouds. What makes these different from public and private clouds, and what is the benefit? Is it just a fancy name for public cloud, or is it a private one? Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) are related to the public cloud, but they are not the same. Instead of sharing resources and space in a public infrastructure, you get a changeable allotment of resources to configure. There is a certain level of isolation between you and other users, via a private IP subnet and virtual communication construct (such as a VLAN) on a per user basis. This ensures a secure method of remotely accessing your cloud resources. This isolation within a public cloud lends the name “virtual private” because you are essentially operating a private cloud within a public cloud. That also doesn’t mean Virtual Private Clouds and private clouds are the same. Private clouds are entirely dedicated to your organization, and that includes the hardware. Virtual Private clouds do not have the same hardware dedication; it just creates a more secure environment on public infrastructure. Think…