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Tag: hybrid cloud

How AIOps is Revolutionizing DevOps Monitoring in the Cloud Era
Cloud computing and distributed systems move at lightning speed and standard monitoring tools are at risk of falling behind. The shift to more dynamic, interconnected and microservices-driven applications creates a deluge of telemetry data from distributed logs, metrics and traces that DevOps teams must sift through. AIOps is the next step in advancement, integrating modern-day smart tools – helping organizations by proactively detecting, diagnosing and resolving incidents in real time.

Why Traditional Monitoring Doesn’t Work

Before the cloud-native shift, DevOps teams could rely on fixed infrastructure and predictable application behavior. Monitoring tools would collect metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption and response time from static servers. But that doesn’t work today. The challenges include the following:
- Ephemeral architectures: Unlike traditional architectures, the architecture of modern-day applications are ephemeral with containers, serverless functions and microservices used to create short-lived components that can scale and handle massive workloads.
- Data explosion: The volume, variety and velocity of telemetry data (i.e., logs, traces and metrics) grow exponentially in today’s applications, which is extremely difficult to handle with traditional monitoring techniques.
- Human bottleneck: Manual efforts in legacy systems can’t keep up with the real-time demands of today’s applications that need high scalability. Moreover, legacy applications are not adept at leveraging AI and machine learning techniques for anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, or automated remediation.
AIOps removes these bottlenecks by automation, root-cause analysis and anomaly detection across massive, fast-changing environments.

What is AIOps?

AIOps is a practice that blends the power of AI with IT operations to improve operational processes in an organization. It achieves this via automation and optimization and enhancement of IT operations in an enterprise, and provides real-time visibility and predictive alerts to minimize operation issues and proactively resolve them if they arise. The key benefits of AIOps include the following:
- Reduced downtime
- Cost Savings
- Enhanced security
AIOps in Cloud-Native and Hybrid Environments

Cloud-native architectures make AIOps more useful than ever before. With dynamic scaling, multi-cloud deployments and serverless services, observability gets more and more complicated. AIOps simplifies this with unified data views, accurate analysis, and adaptive insights.

The key benefits of AIOps in cloud and hybrid environments include the following:
- End-to-end visibility across cloud platforms and on-prem systems through centralized observability.
- Dynamic scaling that can auto-allocate resources.
- Anomaly detection across distributed traces and service meshes.
- Hybrid data correlation for consistent incident management across cloud and legacy systems.
Integrating AIOps Into the DevOps Pipeline

To fully realize the potential of AIOps, you should integrate its capabilities at various stages of the DevOps lifecycle. These integration points include the following:
- CI/CD pipelines: AIOps is able to autonomously detect any anomalies in the build process, as well as in the deployments, and roll back. AI-powered insights are able to determine the best time to push releases out and to make the best use of available resources.
- Monitoring and Logging: Integrating AIOps into observability stacks by using monitoring and logging tools such as Prometheus, Grafana and Open Telemetry improves observability. It should be noted here that AIOps implements predictive rather than reactive monitoring.
- Incident Management: AIOps integrated with systems like ServiceNow facilitates the creation of tickets, setting priorities and prioritization of incidents.
- Security and Compliance: You can blend AIOps into the DevOps pipeline to identify any compliance issues and security threats in a proactive manner, thereby boosting the security of your DevOps workflow.
By analyzing the effects of any code changes in the application, operational events and incidents, AIOps can come up with insights to help future development, test coverage and operational practices in an enterprise.

Figure 1: Integrating AIOps into DevOps

The Future of AIOps in DevOps

AIOps is all set to have an excellent future in the years to come. It is predicted that with the introduction of generative AI, contextual chatbots will be capable of engaging in conversation with DevOps engineers at the systems level, synthesizing alerts and generating responses dynamically.

Here’s what the future holds for AIOps in DevOps practices:
- AI-driven conversation in operational dashboards
- A move from reactive to proactive capacity planning in complex multi-cloud systems
- A move toward AIOps integrated with GitOps workflows for deployment automation
- Continuous model retraining with contextual analytics on incidents
AIOps is likely to fulfil the long-standing goals of DevOps – helping you to build systems that are fully autonomous, resilient and self-optimizing. AIOps systems are capable of converging machine learning, big data analytics and automation in order to predict possible issues, rather than just react to them.

Conclusion

AIOps changes how companies observe, control and fine-tune IT activities within the context of the cloud and its services offered. With machine learning, analytics and automation, instance responses to actions are replaced by the more sophisticated predictions that AIOps can generate.

AIOps should not only be viewed as an addition to the existing DevOps practices; instead, it should be seen as the core element of the next generation of operational excellence. AIOps positions companies to gain unparalleled dexterity, originality and prosperity throughout their digital transformation pathway and beyond.
November 4, 2025
From Cloud to Cognitive Infrastructure: How AI is Redefining the Next Frontier of SRE

As organizations embrace artificial intelligence (AI) workloads alongside traditional cloud systems, site reliability engineering (SRE) must evolve to manage an entirely new class of infrastructure — intelligent, hybrid and graphics processing unit (GPU)-driven.

Infrastructure has transformed dramatically over the past two decades. We began with physical servers in local data centers, then virtualization improved efficiency by abstracting compute resources. The public cloud changed everything, offering elasticity and scalability that on-premises environments couldn’t match.

SRE emerged during this cloud era to bridge the gap between developers and operations. SREs took on responsibility for ensuring systems remained observable, automated and resilient at scale. The discipline matured alongside cloud adoption.

However, complete cloud dependence created new challenges. Costs escalated, compliance requirements grew more complex and organizations sought greater control. The hybrid and multi-cloud approach became the answer, enabling companies to balance workloads across on-premises infrastructure, public cloud and multiple providers.

For a while, this hybrid model seemed like the final evolution. Then AI arrived and transformed the conversation entirely.

AI Demands Different Infrastructure

AI isn’t just another application you can throw on existing infrastructure — it requires fundamentally different resources.

Traditional compute runs on central processing units (CPUs) and manages predictable workloads. AI models, however, demand massive parallel processing, specialized GPUs and tensor processing units (TPUs) and extremely low-latency connections between training and inference systems. This hardware is expensive, in short supply and concentrated in specific geographic regions.

Cloud providers have rolled out AI-optimized instances, but enterprises are quickly realizing that the math doesn’t work long-term — costs add up fast. Data sovereignty matters more than ever. Control is critical, especially for model training and fine-tuning.

So, we’re seeing something unexpected: The data center is making a comeback. However, this isn’t your old-school server room — these facilities are smarter, distributed and tightly interconnected with cloud resources.

Companies are now running two parallel infrastructure tracks: One that oversees traditional workloads such as microservices, applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) and another that manages AI workloads, including model training, inference, vector search and data pipelines. Managing both simultaneously introduces complexity we haven’t dealt with before.

The hyperscalers and tech giants have the resources and expertise to handle this dual-infrastructure challenge. But what about everyone else? Mid-sized enterprises and even mature organizations without those hyperscale resources are facing the same demands without the same depth of talent or budget. They’re being forced to figure out AI infrastructure alongside companies that built their businesses on distributed systems from day one.

SRE Gets More Complex

SRE has always adapted to infrastructure changes, and AI is driving yet another evolution. This time, however, the complexity is on a different level.

The reliability metrics that worked for traditional systems no longer fully capture what matters for AI infrastructure. Yes, we still care about latency, availability and error budgets — but now we also need to track GPU utilization efficiency, because idle GPUs can burn thousands of dollars per hour.

Inference reliability matters too — models must respond consistently even when loads fluctuate wildly.

Data freshness has become a reliability concern. If training data gets stale, model performance degrades — something a traditional uptime metric will never detect. Additionally, we can’t ignore energy and cooling efficiency anymore. GPU clusters consume enormous amounts of power and generate serious heat.

Observability must also evolve beyond what we’re used to. Traditional metrics and traces are no longer enough. We need real-time visibility into model-serving health, GPU cluster orchestration and pipeline performance. That means combining cloud-native observability tools with AI-specific telemetry systems.

The Hybrid AI Reality

Organizations didn’t abandon their data centers when cloud computing arrived, and AI infrastructure won’t replace cloud either. Instead, they will coexist, creating new architectural patterns.

We’re already seeing hybrid AI clusters, where companies train models on- premises for data control and then scale inference workloads out to the public cloud. AI-aware load balancers can now route intelligently — sending inference requests to GPU-backed nodes while directing standard web traffic to CPU clusters. Cross-cloud orchestration layers are emerging to manage workloads seamlessly across data centers and hyperscalers.

SREs sit at the center of this evolving ecosystem. They ensure reliability across CPUs, GPUs and data pipelines. Both AI and traditional services must meet their service level agreements (SLAs), and SREs have to make that happen across an increasingly complex environment.

When AI Manages Reliability

Here’s where it gets interesting: AI won’t just be another workload to manage — it’s beginning to assist with reliability management itself.

AI-driven SRE platforms are emerging that can predict outages before they happen, recommend scaling actions based on patterns humans might overlook and auto-heal systems without manual intervention. The technology is rapidly improving at identifying problems and resolving them automatically.

However, even with increasing automation, the human element remains essential. SREs provide context, understand trade-offs and assess risks in ways that automated systems can’t replicate. The SRE of the future won’t just manage services — they will also manage the intelligence that manages those services. That’s a significant shift in responsibility.

What Comes Next

Infrastructure evolves to solve new challenges. Virtualization brought efficiency. Cloud brought scale. Hybrid brought flexibility. Now AI brings intelligence — along with substantial complexity.

As enterprises build these hybrid AI infrastructures, the demand for resilient, efficient and adaptive operations will only intensify. Tomorrow’s site reliability engineers will need expertise in both traditional infrastructure and AI systems. They will ensure not just uptime, but also model performance, GPU efficiency and intelligent reliability across both worlds.

AI infrastructure isn’t replacing cloud computing — it’s extending it in new directions. SREs will be the ones ensuring everything works together — seamlessly, securely and intelligently. The role is evolving once again, and that transformation is already underway.

October 24, 2025
Self-Hosting is Dead. Hybrid is the Way to Go

If I scroll back through my photo library, it’s astonishing how few photos I have from before 2004. And in 2006 (and probably for a few years after that), I still kept every photo I had on the hard drive of my laptop computer. If I lost that laptop, those photos would be gone forever. At some point, I went through the process to back them up to an external hard drive.

And then along came the cloud. At some point, I could give my pictures to Apple or Google and not worry about backups. There was always the possibility they could have a critical disaster and lose every wedding photo I had or all the early pictures of my kids (it could still happen). But as a father who takes way too many pictures of my kids, I no longer maintain an external drive of backups because the several terabytes of photos I have are sufficiently stored and backed up in the big cloud provider I pay to handle it. The SaaS solution in a cloud backup was more than sufficient for me.

Camera Rolls and Data Centers

Likewise, it wasn’t that long ago that any meaningful internet presence required a company to have a large server room and host their own infrastructure. That meant racks and racks of computers and an enterprise internet connection to make sure customers could access those racks of computers. Most services you relied upon had to be close by physically to deal with latency and ensure the experience worked for your customers.

Logging and metrics were kept locally, as were backups. I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers swapping out big tape drives for daily backups and storing them in large plastic bins somewhere we really hoped wouldn’t flood.

If you were using a significant piece of software, you would need to self-host that software for many reasons—but the biggest reason was that shared infrastructure wasn’t a reality yet. There was no way to share hardware and no meaningful way to share software in a multi-tenant environment.

IaaS, the Cloud, Automated Backups and SaaS

Today, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS, or “Cloud”) providers are offering everything from email hosting to Kubernetes-as-a-service (KaaS), from serverless to logging. They even make sure the software that enables your edge computing is obscured from you and managed by them (backups are automatic! And included in the price! And happen without a single person touching a tape drive!). This frees us up significantly to spend time shipping code and bits instead of fiddling with wires, CPUs and drives. It’s like shipping your photos to a SaaS photo storage provider—it takes the headache and the worry away. Yet when companies move to the cloud, many maintain the “old way” of doing things because they haven’t adjusted to the new reality yet.

There is now no need to self-host your own email service. The cloud provides it, or you can use a third-party service that runs in the same cloud. Data proximity is no longer a concern, and latency won’t suffer. Similarly, there is no need to self-host your backups or even your logging service—because the cloud will provide it, and similarly, a third-party service is no longer a latency concern—that third party is probably hosted by the same cloud in the same region.

This move to the cloud and shared infrastructure has been a game changer. SaaS is the name of the winning solution. Still, there will always be some companies with compliance or security needs that want to maintain data residency, just like there will always be people with such sensitive data or important family photos that no matter how safe and reliable the cloud is, they’ll insist on self-storage for photos and backups.

The Hybrid Solution

That’s why a hybrid cloud is the future of cloud-native solutions for complex enterprise applications and data. You host the data, but the SaaS provider hosts the application. The data stays under your control, but the SaaS firm updates the application regularly. Today, a large enterprise may have five engineers just to handle a self-hosted version of a logging app. At $180,000/year per engineer (a reasonable tech salary today), that’s almost a million dollars per year to maintain a software product that the vendor will gladly maintain for you.

This is a simple shift, but it has only become a reality recently due to advances in technology, the things the cloud has enabled and the increased headache—now seemingly unnecessarily dated—of self-hosting (and then upgrading and patching) software built by a third party.

With a hybrid cloud offering, you’re always using the latest version of the software because you’re using the software hosted and updated by the SaaS provider. There is no need to self-update, scale up or down or security patch a self-hosted install. The SaaS provider handles the compute and scaling required to make the service run smoothly. And you get the best of both worlds — zero software maintenance while still keeping your data in your own hands.

To hear more about cloud-native topics, join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Techstrong Group and the entire cloud-native community in Paris, France at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2024 – March 19-22, 2024.

February 29, 2024
Blueprints for a Secure, Future-Proof Hybrid Cloud

For today’s organizations, hybrid environments are a given. Whether for legacy reasons, regulatory requirements, or other specific needs, some of an enterprise’s critical data is likely to reside on, or in some cases, revert to, on-premises. However, other equally crucial data might be more efficiently and cost-effectively suited for storing and accessing in the cloud. Hence, hybrid.

Despite their logic and many benefits, hybrid environments bring new levels of complexity. And they bring greater vulnerability, with ever more devious cyber threats probing the multitude of network access points. More than 80% of breaches now involve data stored in hybrid environments, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2023 Report.

That’s why, to avoid data loss and maintain a comprehensive level of protection across the entire environment, organizations need a blueprint for adopting and evolving their hybrid systems. The right solution enables data protection across workloads, providing the hybrid enterprise with the flexibility to protect data wherever it is today — and wherever it might be in the future.

A growing multitude of organizations in various industries have successfully implemented blueprints of this sort, built on the following foundational considerations:

Cost-optimization: A solution that can span a hybrid environment — SaaS, software and on-premises — and reduce infrastructure to manage and save administrative time.

Air-gapped security: Backup of the most critical data in cloud locations that can’t be accessed through whatever network or networks might be the focus of a cyberattack.

Fast recovery: Flexible, performance-optimized storage combined with the ability to send an air-gapped copy to the cloud for ransomware protection.

Broad coverage: An integrated set of software, appliance and SaaS offerings that span hybrid environments — and can evolve with the organization.

Simple management: Single-pane-of-glass dashboards for monitoring the hybrid environment while reducing management overhead.

Reliability for peace of mind: Leveraging industry-leading, trusted platform solutions rather than unproven point products.

Now’s the time to see it in action.

Ensuring an Insurer’s Data Backup

In Israel, Harel Group is the country’s top insurance and financial services provider, managing a large volume of data and investments. As such, a critical priority for the company is to ensure all that data is 100% backed up and can be restored without any issues.

Harel Group were using a secure solution to reliably protect more than 1.5PB of data in its on-premises environment. More recently, though, it has sought the flexibility and efficiencies of moving part of its infrastructure to the cloud. However, stringent industry regulatory requirements meant Harel could store sensitive data in the public cloud only if it could be backed up and stored as efficiently, securely and reliably as the on-premises data. What they needed was a SaaS solution.

“A SaaS solution takes care of data availability, but not the backup operation of the data,” said David Ben-Eli, system IT infrastructure manager for Harel Group. “We knew from day one that in taking on Microsoft 365, we would need a SaaS solution with good restore functionality that satisfies our business model and strategy.”

And so, Harel designed a blueprint based on a fully managed SaaS platform. The initial stage involved protecting approximately 1,000 of its employees’ mailboxes, which will soon cover more than 5,000 mailboxes.

The SaaS solution also enabled Harel to move its on-premises storage securely to the cloud, which has the dual advantage of reducing infrastructure costs and air-gapping its backups to mitigate the risk of ransomware attacks. “We have peace of mind that our data is secure,” Ben-Eli said. And the entire cost of the SaaS solution “is less than the cost of hiring more people.”

Backing up and protecting a company’s data in a hybrid environment is challenging enough. To be a vendor providing those capabilities to other companies comes with additional challenges.

A Vendor Puts its Data in Order

Evolutio, based in Madrid, is a leading enabler of cloud services that provides more than 5,600 kilometers of deployed networks with 6,100 virtual machines across three data centers. Its goal is to support customers’ digital transformations and foster their agility, flexibility and innovation capacity to optimize their business value.

To meet Evolutio’s needs, Alain Rodriguez, head of services management office, had to find an easy-to-use solution that consumed minimal resources to manage backups and security for Microsoft 365. His blueprint aimed to protect critical data before anything could go wrong.

So, Evolutio chose a single platform to back up and restore data for internal systems. By implementing a fully hosted SaaS-based solution, Evolutio no longer needs to worry about purchasing and maintaining equipment yearly. There is also no upfront investment required and no additional costs for support from the vendor. As a result, Evolutio’s business can grow on demand.

Resolving a Global Data Sprawl

Woodward, Inc. is an American designer, manufacturer and service provider of control systems and components for aircraft engines, industrial engines and power systems. The company has been growing significantly across dozens of global networking sites, with expansion that quadrupled the size of data and backed-up servers.

Virtual machine sprawl ate into company resources while complicating backup operations requiring standardized procedures. Slow legacy servers and apps made it impossible to meet recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) targets. And the absence of a coherent, comprehensive disaster recovery plan worsened things.

Topping this off was increased backup storage costs via disk and tape and a need for central management or cross-department visibility into data protection and backup policy compliance. There was no blueprint, in other words.

After trying unsuccessfully to address its needs with various disparate solutions, Woodward decided to replace everything with a comprehensive cloud-based backup and recovery platform. The company switched all global sites to this solution. As a result, Woodward has reduced the overhead of managing their data protection, can consistently enforce backup, restore and retention policies and has unprecedented comprehensive visibility and reporting across the end-to-end environment.

“I used to cringe when I received a restore request since backups would frequently fail,’’ said Loren Leveque, senior manager of IT and system networking. With the cloud-based platform, he said, “I am ready to support the backup, restore and archive needs of our company.”

Supporting Dozens of Manufacturing Plants

Linamar Corporation is a diversified global manufacturing company and world leader in designing, developing and producing highly engineered products. Because the Canadian company supports 61 plants globally, a cloud approach became necessary to streamline efficiency in backup and recovery.

Linamar had recently shifted from Microsoft Exchange on-premises to cloud-based Microsoft 365 for its 7,000+ users worldwide, and the company’s tape-based backup system didn’t support it. The built-in Microsoft 365 data protection was a start, but it couldn’t handle the rapidly expanding demands imposed by Linamar’s global network.

By moving to a cloud-based backup and recovery platform supporting Microsoft 365, Linamar saved the costs and administrative time previously needed for managing tapes. And backup is no longer a full-time job – it’s more like “when you need it, set it up,” said Kristian Smith, Linamar’s manager of technical services and support. Restores can now be handled 100% within the team and take hours to execute, not weeks.

Bringing it All Together

The examples might be as varied and numerous as enterprises worldwide with crucial data to protect. But these and any other success stories all have at least one thing in common: They took a blueprint approach to ensuring that their hybrid environment is secure and sufficiently future-proof.

February 23, 2024
Navigating the Hybrid Cloud Maze: Overcoming Adoption Hurdles

Hybrid cloud solutions mark a significant evolution in organizational IT strategy, blending on-premises infrastructure with cloud-based services. This approach offers a unique mix of control, flexibility and scalability and introduces new dimensions in IT security. Crucial for businesses adapting to dynamic market demands, the hybrid model necessitates a robust security framework to protect sensitive data across diverse platforms. By integrating the security aspect into its core, hybrid clouds cater to the strategic shift towards more agile, responsive and cost-effective IT operations, ensuring that advanced security measures are ingrained in every layer of the infrastructure. A recent report states that 72% of organizations using a hybrid approach combine public and private clouds, highlighting the growing need for comprehensive security strategies in these environments.

The transition to a hybrid cloud model introduces a unique set of security challenges that are critical to address. These challenges include ensuring secure data transfers between on-premises and cloud environments, protecting against increased surface attacks due to the interconnected nature of hybrid systems, managing identity and access controls across diverse platforms and ensuring compliance with various regulatory standards.

Types of Organizations Suited for Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Hybrid cloud solutions are particularly beneficial for organizations requiring a blend of security, flexibility and scalability. Enterprises with fluctuating workloads, including e-commerce platforms that experience seasonal spikes, find hybrid clouds ideal for managing these variations efficiently. Organizations handling sensitive data, such as healthcare and financial institutions, benefit from the hybrid model’s ability to store critical data on-premises while utilizing the cloud for less sensitive operations. Start-ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) also find hybrid clouds appealing due to their ability to scale resources as the business grows without requiring substantial upfront infrastructure investment. Additionally, companies in sectors like retail and manufacturing, where legacy systems are prevalent, can leverage hybrid clouds to innovate without completely overhauling their existing IT setup.

Standardized Integration Protocols

Standardized integration protocols are fundamental in hybrid cloud environments, acting as the glue that connects disparate systems seamlessly. They ensure consistent communication and data flow between on-premises infrastructure and cloud services, which is crucial for maintaining operational efficiency and data integrity. A well-known example of such a protocol is the open data protocol (OData). OData, used for data integration, enables interoperability between different systems by providing a uniform method to query and update data. This protocol is beneficial in a hybrid cloud setup because it allows applications to access information from various sources, including on-premises databases or cloud-based storage, through a common interface. Organizations can mitigate the complexities of integrating diverse computing environments by employing standardized protocols like OData.

Dynamic Security Strategies

With the complexity inherent in hybrid cloud environments, dynamic security strategies are indispensable to safeguard data and applications across varied platforms. These environments blend on-premises and cloud infrastructures, each presenting its own set of security challenges. The intricate nature of these setups demands a fluid and responsive security approach that can swiftly adapt to emerging threats and the unique attributes of different infrastructure components. Continuously evolving security measures are essential to keep pace with the ever-changing threat landscape, ensuring comprehensive protection for both on-premises and cloud-based systems.

The effectiveness of these strategies is particularly crucial in defending against incidents like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which can exploit the interconnected nature of hybrid environments. Employing advanced security solutions that offer proactive and automatic mitigation capabilities is key to minimizing potential downtime and latency issues. A well-integrated security strategy, encompassing both cloud and on-premises defenses, is vital to maintaining the integrity and availability of services across the hybrid cloud architecture. This balanced approach ensures that data and applications remain secure, irrespective of location within the hybrid cloud framework.

Solutions for Harnessing Hybrid Cloud Benefits

It is crucial to intertwine strategic solutions and best practices with robust security measures to maximize the advantages of hybrid cloud environments. Cost optimization, while essential, must go hand-in-hand with security considerations. Effective security management involves not just monitoring and optimizing costs but also ensuring that each investment contributes to a more robust security posture. This includes deploying resources to enhance protection against cyber threats and regularly assessing the security implications of resource allocation within hybrid environments.

Approaching efficient resource deployment and utilization with a security-first mindset is imperative. Practices such as auto-scaling, which dynamically adjusts resources based on demand, should be integrated with security protocols to ensure that changes in resource allocation do not compromise security. This approach is crucial for maintaining operational efficiency and cost control and ensuring that the hybrid cloud environment remains resilient against evolving security threats. Embracing these practices helps organizations leverage the full benefits of hybrid cloud solutions, achieving a balance between performance, cost-effectiveness, and, most importantly, stringent security.

The Evolving Landscape of Hybrid Cloud Architectures

As hybrid cloud architectures evolve, security experts need to anticipate emerging threats and adapt to new technologies. The horizon for cloud security is increasingly complex, with sophisticated cyberthreats challenging traditional defenses. To stay ahead of the competition and threats, professionals must invest in continuous learning, leverage artificial intelligence and predictive analytics for threat detection, and foster a culture of security innovation. Preparing for these changes involves technology adoption and developing proactive, intelligence-driven security strategies for a resilient digital future.

January 18, 2024
Hybrid Cloud in 2024: Trends and Predictions

Hybrid cloud environments are becoming increasingly pivotal for DevOps teams, primarily due to their ability to bridge the gap between the rapid deployment of public cloud resources and the security and control of private cloud infrastructure. This blending of environments provides DevOps teams with flexibility and scalability, which is crucial for operating continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) in large enterprises.

In a hybrid cloud setup, DevOps teams can swiftly deploy and test new applications in a cost-effective and scalable public cloud environment. Once the applications are ready for production, they can be seamlessly transitioned to a private cloud or on-premises environment, where they benefit from enhanced security and control. This allows DevOps teams to optimize their workflows, reduce time to market, and respond more effectively to business needs.

The hybrid cloud also enables a more collaborative and agile working environment. DevOps teams can leverage various tools and platforms available in the public cloud while ensuring that sensitive data and critical applications are securely managed in the private cloud. This both enhances operational efficiency and improves compliance with data governance and regulatory requirements. These benefits will make hybrid cloud an indispensable asset for DevOps teams in 2024 and beyond.

What is a Hybrid Cloud?

Let’s start with a brief definition. A hybrid cloud is a computing environment that combines a public cloud and a private cloud by allowing data and applications to be shared between them. This combination allows businesses to enjoy the best of both worlds, leveraging the scalability and cost efficiencies of public cloud platforms while enjoying the security and control offered by private cloud infrastructure.

This hybrid cloud model provides businesses with more deployment options and greater flexibility to scale computing resources. It also helps in reducing capital expenditure and improving security by allowing sensitive data to be stored on a private cloud. A hybrid cloud strategy enables businesses to allocate resources efficiently, keeping less critical applications on the public cloud, while mission-critical applications run on the private cloud.

Current State of Hybrid Cloud Computing

The hybrid cloud market is in a state of rapid growth and evolution. As businesses increasingly recognize the benefits of a hybrid approach, the adoption of hybrid cloud strategies is on the rise.

In a world where digital transformation is the norm, hybrid cloud computing has emerged as a key enabler. It offers the flexibility needed to adapt quickly to changing business conditions, the scalability to handle sudden increases in workload, and the security to protect sensitive data. These benefits have made hybrid cloud a cornerstone of digital transformation strategies.

However, the journey to hybrid cloud is not without its challenges. Businesses are grappling with issues related to data security, compliance, integration, and management. There are also complexities related to workload portability, interoperability, and the need for skilled resources. Despite these challenges, the adoption of hybrid cloud continues to grow as businesses seek to leverage its benefits to drive innovation and competitive advantage.

Emerging Trends in Hybrid Cloud for 2024

Increased Adoption Across Industries

Many industries, including the banking and finance sector, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and even the government sector, are seeing increased adoption of hybrid cloud strategies. This trend is driven by the need for greater agility and flexibility, better cost management, and improved security and compliance.

In the healthcare sector, for example, hybrid cloud is enabling the integration of disparate systems, facilitating the sharing of patient data, and supporting telehealth initiatives. In the banking sector, it is helping to manage risk, improve customer experiences, and drive innovation. In retail, hybrid cloud is supporting omnichannel strategies, personalizing customer experiences, and improving supply chain efficiency.

Advancements in Cloud Technology

The hybrid cloud landscape in 2024 will be shaped by advancements in cloud technologies. Technologies like containers and Kubernetes are simplifying the deployment and management of applications, making it easier for businesses to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. The rise of serverless computing is also contributing to the growth of hybrid cloud by eliminating the need to manage servers and allowing developers to focus on writing code.

Furthermore, advancements in networking technologies are making it easier to connect and integrate public and private clouds. The emergence of 5G is expected to further accelerate the adoption of hybrid cloud by providing the high-speed connectivity needed to support real-time applications.

Integration of AI and Machine Learning

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into hybrid cloud environments is a trend that is rapidly gaining momentum. One key aspect of this integration is the ability to use AI for better resource management within the hybrid cloud. AI algorithms can analyze patterns in data usage and application performance, allowing for more efficient allocation of resources across public and private cloud environments.

Furthermore, AI and ML are also facilitating better data management and analytics. Cloud-based services are making AI/ML more accessible to businesses of all sizes. By integrating these technologies, businesses can unlock insights from vast amounts of data stored across different cloud environments.

Predictions for Hybrid Cloud in 2024

Growth in Edge Computing Integration

By 2024, the integration of edge computing with hybrid cloud architectures is expected to grow significantly. Edge computing brings data processing closer to the location where it is needed, optimizing response times and saving bandwidth.

In a hybrid cloud context, this means that organizations can process critical data at the edge, in real-time, while still leveraging the cloud for less time-sensitive tasks. This integration is particularly beneficial for industries like manufacturing and autonomous vehicles, where real-time data processing is crucial. The combination of edge and hybrid cloud computing enables businesses to harness the power of cloud computing while maintaining the speed and efficiency of edge processing.

Improved Security and Compliance Measures

In 2024, we anticipate significant advancements in the security and compliance aspects of hybrid cloud environments. As these environments become more complex, the need for robust security measures that span both public and private clouds is crucial. Enhanced encryption techniques, more sophisticated identity and access management systems, and advanced threat detection tools will become standard.

Additionally, we expect to see the development of more streamlined compliance benchmarks and frameworks designed specifically for hybrid cloud architectures, simplifying the process of adhering to various regulatory standards and ensuring data privacy and protection across multiple platforms.

Innovations in Cloud Management Platforms

The year 2024 is likely to witness substantial innovations in cloud management platforms, driven by the need to manage complex hybrid cloud environments more efficiently. These platforms will offer enhanced capabilities in terms of automation, orchestration, and unified management across multiple cloud services.

The use of AI and machine learning for predictive analysis, resource optimization, and proactive problem resolution will become more prevalent. These platforms will also provide better tools for cost management and analytics, giving businesses a more granular understanding of their cloud usage and enabling more cost-effective decision-making.

Customizable and Flexible Cloud Solutions

As hybrid cloud environments continue to evolve, 2024 will likely see a rise in more customizable and flexible cloud solutions tailored to specific business needs. Providers will offer a range of options that allow businesses to mix and match services from both public and private clouds, creating highly personalized cloud environments.

This customization will extend to aspects like security, performance, and compliance, allowing businesses to fine-tune their cloud infrastructure to their specific requirements. Such flexibility will be particularly beneficial for businesses in niche markets or those with unique operational needs, enabling them to leverage the power of cloud computing without compromising on their specific requirements.

Conclusion

By 2024, hybrid cloud computing will have significantly evolved, becoming a critical component in the digital transformation strategies of various industries. This technology offers a blend of public and private cloud benefits, crucial for DevOps teams in terms of flexibility, scalability, and security. The integration of advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and edge computing will enhance resource management, data analytics, and real-time data processing. Additionally, the hybrid cloud’s role in ensuring agility, better cost management, and compliance is expected to drive its wider adoption across sectors like healthcare, banking, retail, and government.

The landscape will also see advancements in security and compliance, with sophisticated measures spanning both cloud types and cloud management platforms will evolve to include AI and machine learning for more efficient operations. Customizable and flexible cloud solutions will become prevalent, allowing businesses to tailor their cloud environments according to specific needs. Overall, hybrid cloud in 2024 will be a strategic enabler, equipping businesses with the necessary tools and capabilities to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

December 20, 2023
Best Practices for DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud

In rеcеnt years, various tools, technologies and frameworks have еmеrgеd with thе goal of enhancing flеxibility, performance and scalability. Traditional monolithic approaches have been replaced by more modular methods like microservices and nano-services. Additionally, the rise of cloud computing has led to on-prеmisеs software being replaced by cloud еnvironmеnts that offer a wide array of advantages and capabilities that were previously unavailable.

Bеing able to optimize spееd and efficiency through the adaptation of cloud settings is a vital capability. To leverage cloud-bursting capabilities and also safeguard their applications and data, businеssеs can embrace a hybrid cloud strategy combined with DеvOps. In this article, we will dеlvе into bеst practices for implеmеnting DеvOps in a hybrid cloud sеtting.

What is a Hybrid Cloud Environment?

A hybrid cloud, which combines on-premises and cloud computing modеls, allows you to harness the benefits of both approaches. Hybrid cloud computing allows businеssеs to blеnd their own on-prеmisеs infrastructurе with thе powеr and flеxibility of cloud computing. This approach allows them to optimize their current infrastructure while also benefiting from the scalability and cost efficiency offered by public cloud environments.

By lеvеraging thе strеngths of both, companies can optimizе their opеrations for scalability and flеxibility and еnhancе sеcurity for thеir applications and data. One notablе advantage of hybrid cloud еnvironmеnts is their ability to adapt rеsourcе capacity to mееt еvolving workload dеmands rapidly.

A hybrid cloud offers flexibility and cost optimization to businesses. With a hybrid cloud, enterprises can scale up their resources and adapt to changing needs, much like a public cloud. At the same time, it allows them to retain control over sensitive data and critical applications stored on-site.

By adopting a hybrid cloud environment, organizations gain enhanced data control and the ability to flexibly allocate workloads based on evolving business needs. Organizations can achieve improved flexibility, enhanced security and regulatory compliance by adopting a hybrid cloud model.

What are the Benefits?

Here are the benefits of a hybrid cloud:

Cost-effectiveness: The cloud offers a cost-effective solution for deploying workloads. When using the cloud, an organization does not have to spend much money to purchasе additional infrastructure. Moreover, most cloud environments provide support for a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which implies you only have to pay for what you consume.

Avoids Vendor Lock-in: Companies often face the challenge of becoming too dependent on one cloud provider during the transition to the cloud, making it difficult to switch to another provider if it becomes necessary to do so. However, by adopting a hybrid model and specifically migrating to a platform that supports multiple providers, companies can mitigate this risk and avoid being locked into one vendor.

Improved Developer Productivity: By deploying a hybrid cloud platform, developers will be able to significantly enhance their productivity. With this approach, developers can leverage Agile and DevOps methodologies more efficiently and deploy their applications across multiple cloud infrastructures simultaneously.

Infrastructure Efficiency: A hybrid cloud offers development and IT operations teams enhanced and smooth control over resources. Organizations can also leverage cloud services and combine them with data stored in the cloud or on-premises infrastructure to create more value through the hybrid cloud.

Better compliance and security: Hybrid clouds offer significant benefits for business growth and acceleration. They enable faster product development cycles, promote innovation and expedite time to market. Additionally, they facilitate prompt response to customer feedback and allow for the delivery of applications in closer proximity to customers. Hybrid clouds also facilitate the integration of new services from third-party providers.

Cloud-bursting: One valuable feature of hybrid cloud environments is called cloud bursting, which enables organizations to easily increase their resource capacity to meet varying work demands.

An Overview of Hybrid Cloud Architecture

A typical hybrid cloud architecture comprises of the following components:

On-Premises Infrastructure: This refers to your privately owned physical infrastructure that can be used for storage, network, host servers, etc.

Private Cloud: Generally speaking, a private cloud is an environment that is dedicated solely to the use of a single organization. It can be hosted either internally within the organization’s own premises or externally, but it is securely protected and not accessible to the general public.

Public Cloud: The term public cloud refers to a computing model in which services such as compute, storage, deployment, etc. is provided by third-party providers as a fully managed service over the internet.

Cloud Management Platform: A cloud management platform is responsible for managing the operation and allocation of computing resources across various cloud platforms. It also helps businesses effectively use their hybrid cloud environments.

Orchestration and Automation Tools: Streamlining tasks such as resource provisioning and data synchronization across different environments requires the use of orchestration and automation tools. These tools are crucial in ensuring efficiency and seamless operations.

Best Practices for DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud

Albeit the benefits it provides, successfully implementing DevOps in a hybrid cloud requires you to adhere to certain best practices:

Monitoring: Ensure your on-premises and cloud environments are monitored and managed effectively by using the right tools. These tools offer a comprehensive view of your resources, regardless of their hosting location.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Use tools like CloudFormation, Terraform or ARM to automate infrastructure provisioning and management. IaC ensures that infrastructure is built consistently and reliably.

Containerization: Container technologies such as Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes abstract the underlying infrastructure and make moving applications between on-premises and the cloud easier.

Centralized logging: Make sure you have a centralized solution for metrics, logs and traces (like ELK Stack, Prometheus and/or Grafana) that can collect data from both the platform and the cloud environment.

Automation: From CI/CD pipelines to infrastructure deployment, it’s critical to ensure that processes are automated by leveraging tools like GitLab CI, GitHub Actions and/or Jenkins.

Security: You should consistently implement a robust security strategy. Consider the unique security requirements of a hybrid system, such as security of data transfer between disk and the cloud, encryption at rest and in transit and consistent identity and access management.

Performance: Understand latency and bandwidth issues when transferring data between disk and the cloud. Choose the right architecture (such as edge computing) and optimize your applications to minimize these issues.

Data management and integration: You should understand where your data comes from and pay attention to data gravity. You should also link applications and data sources on the server and in the cloud to ensure smooth data flow.

Application architecture: You should design cloud-agnostic, modular and flexible applications. A microservices architecture often works well for hybrid cloud environments.

Disaster Recovery and Backup: Take advantage of both on-premises and cloud resources to establish a robust disaster recovery and backup strategy.

Administration and policy management: You should enforce consistent policies across both environments using policy-as-code by leveraging tools such as Open Policy Agent (OPA).

Training and skills development: Note that hybrid clouds require knowledge across multiple platforms. Ensure your team is trained and has the skills to manage and operate a hybrid environment.

Budget and cost management: You should monitor costs on the server and in the cloud. Tools such as AWS Cost Explorer, Azurе Cost Management and third-party solutions can provide insight into where your money is going.

Communication and collaboration: Although there are challenges and obstacles, you should encourage open communication and team collaboration.

Regular reviews and audits: Review your architecture, tools and procedures to ensure they align with business goals and are as efficient as possible.

What are the Challenges?

Despite its many advantages, hybrid cloud also comes with some challenges. These challenges arise from the complexities of managing multiple environments and integrating them together. Here are the key challenges of hybrid cloud at a glance:

Security Concerns: Hybrid cloud models can pose security vulnerabilities, particularly if there is inconsistent implementation of security protocols across different environments. It is important to properly secure data that moves between private and public environments to mitigate potential risks.

Data Transfer Costs: When moving data between private and public clouds, it’s important to consider the potential costs involved, particularly when dealing with large volumes of data. Being mindful of these expenses is essential when designing hybrid solutions.

Data Sovereignty and Compliance: You must ensure that data complies with regional and industry-specific regulations when it is stored or processed in multiple locations, including public clouds in different regions.

Latency Issues: One of the challenges that may arise when implementing cloud-based applications is the integration with existing legacy systems. This can be a problem, especially for applications that require real-time or high-performance capabilities.

Vendor lock-in: Vendor lock-in can still be a challenge even with a hybrid approach, especially if organizations heavily depend on proprietary tools or services from a specific cloud provider, making it difficult to migrate or integrate with other platforms.

Skills gap: One challenge in managing and operating a hybrid cloud is the potential for a skills gap, since you’ll need a diverse range of skills, such as knowledge of both on-premises and cloud technologies. To address this, organizations may need to provide training or hire new talent with the necessary expertise in both areas.

Monitoring: Achieving visibility and effective monitoring can be challenging when resources are spread across multiple environments. It often requires specialized tools or platforms to achieve end-to-end visibility and monitor effectively.

Governance and Policy Management: Although it is crucial for maintaining security and compliance, it can be challenging to implement consistent governance and policy management across both private and public clouds.

Cost Management and Optimization: While a hybrid cloud can provide cost benefits, it can also be difficult to track and manage costs across multiple platforms. This requires ongoing monitoring and the implementation of optimization strategies.

Network Connectivity: To achieve secure, reliable and fast connectivity between on-premises and cloud environments, a well-designed network infrastructure is essential. This may involve additional investments in network services or infrastructure to ensure seamless connectivity.

How Hybrid Cloud Supports DevOps Culture

Here’s how hybrid cloud supports DеvOps culture:

Automation: Automation plays a crucial role in both hybrid cloud and DеvOps. By utilizing tools and services provided by cloud providers, automation еnablеs the provisioning, scaling, and management of infrastructure. This aligns with the core principles of DеvOps, which include automated installation, integration, and utilization.

Flexibility: Unlike with a single platform or tool, DevOps teams have the freedom to select the most suitable services and platforms from various cloud providers and incorporate them into their own solutions.

Cost Efficiency: DevOps teams can achieve cost efficiency by using public cloud resources for temporary workloads like test environments or short-term projects. Your teams can optimize their costs by only paying for the resources they actually use, thereby optimizing the amount of money they spend on those resources.

Fast deployment of resources: The fast provisioning and de-provisioning of resources are crucial in a DevOps culture. Hybrid cloud allows for rapid deployment of environments, supporting the iterative and dynamic nature of DevOps practices.

Collaboration: Hybrid cloud solutions often include collaboration tools and platforms that promote effective communication and teamwork, aligning with the collaborative culture of DevOps.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Hybrid cloud provides tools and platforms that support CI/CD pipelines and enable consistent and continuous integration, testing and transition to production (delivery/deployment).

Service Integration: Many cloud providers provide a wide range of services, including machine learning and databases, as part of their cloud offerings. Using these services will allow you to seamlessly integrate them into your applications, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Monitoring and feedback: Hybrid clouds provide robust monitoring, logging and analytics tools that offer valuable insights into application performance and user experiences.

Regulatory compliance: With a hybrid cloud approach, IT teams can maintain the security and compliance of sensitive data and applications by housing them in a private cloud or controlled environment. This way, organizations can meet their compliance and security standards effectively.

Conclusion

A hybrid cloud combines on-premises infrastructure with cloud computing, offering scalability, flexibility and improved security for applications and data. A hybrid cloud infrastructure should be more flexible than a traditional cloud to meet changing requirements. Therefore, businesses with hybrid cloud capabilities can adapt more quickly to business and technological changes.

Businesses can leverage several benefits by implementing DevOps practices in a hybrid cloud environment, such as improved agility, faster release cycles, enhanced scalability and better collaboration. With a hybrid cloud setup, companies can leverage the strengths of both on-premises infrastructure and cloud computing models to achieve scalability and flexibility.

October 3, 2023
Dell Taps Microsoft to Simplify Hybrid Cloud Computing

Dell Technologies, in collaboration with Microsoft, today unveiled a platform that tightly integrates an on-premises IT environment with the Azure cloud.

Caitlin Gordon, vice president of multi-cloud product management for Dell Technologies, said the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is the first instance of a hybrid cloud computing platform designed specifically to address that requirement using a Premier Solution of the Microsoft Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that Microsoft added to its portfolio today.

The Premier Edition of Microsoft Azure Stack HCI makes available an instance of that platform that provides a more turnkey management experience than the existing editions, said Gordon.

In the face of increased economic headwinds, more organizations are looking to lower the total cost of managing IT by reducing the number of control planes that need to be managed. Each platform that an IT team typically supports today has its own control plane that requires IT staff to manage it. Reducing the number of control planes creates an opportunity to reduce the total headcount currently required to manage multiple IT platforms.

It also serves to streamline workflows in a way that enables DevOps teams to reduce the current level of friction encountered when managing multiple IT platforms, noted Gordon.

At the core of Microsoft’s approach to hybrid cloud computing that Dell is embracing is Arc, a management framework that makes it possible to manage Azure cloud instances alongside on-premises IT environments. In terms of the ability to manage hybrid cloud computing environments, Microsoft is significantly more advanced than any other cloud service provider, said Gordon.

It’s not clear whether IT organizations are embracing HCI platforms running an instance of the same core stack of software that Microsoft relies on to provide Azure services. If IT organizations expect to lower the cost of managing IT, there is no doubt they will need to modernize on-premises IT infrastructure. The older the platform, the more expensive it becomes to automate using various third-party frameworks.

Regardless of the approach, IT teams need to reconcile the need to invest in automating workflows that span multiple IT platforms. Over time, those investments will reduce the total cost of IT, but getting the required funding to start that process will require IT teams to make a strong case for increasing the return on investment (ROI).

In the meantime, the number of workloads running both in the cloud and at the network edge is only going to increase. At the same time, the bulk of existing workloads continue to run in local data center environments. Most IT teams will be required to find additional ways to automate the management of all those environments simply because the cost of adding additional IT staff to manage highly distributed computing environments as scale will otherwise be prohibitive.

As such, the issues that IT teams are facing today may be a matter of not if the management of IT will become more automated but how soon.

September 26, 2023
There’s no One-Size-Fits-All Data Mobility Strategy

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 enterprise or a fledgling startup, there’s one thing every business can expect to confront: Change. This is resoundingly true when it comes to data management. Even greenfield operations will, sooner rather than later, need to change how and where they leverage their data. After all, every business—including those launched with the most cutting-edge technology—is built on a series of choices and compromises. As technologies and business priorities change, so should your data mobility strategy.

In a world of ever-changing variables, what’s the right data mobility strategy? There is no one-size-fits-all solution. It does, however, help to start with a solid foundation on which to build your strategy.

With the right platform that allows for flexibility and change, it’s time to build the structural framework for your data mobility strategy. When creating the framework for your data mobility strategy, there are a few considerations to keep in mind, including your desired use of on-premise storage, your hybrid cloud strategy and “supercomputing” capabilities, and the storage area network (SAN) needed based on your organization’s needs. Let’s review what they might mean for you:

Developing a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

The reality is that the hybrid cloud is now achievable for most organizations. According to Flexera’s 2023 State of the Cloud Report, 72% of organizations have embraced a hybrid cloud strategy. Your data mobility strategy should reflect that.

With a proper hybrid cloud environment, the user experience should be seamless regardless of where your data exists, whether that’s on-premise, in a private cloud, or in the public cloud. As the potential for more dynamic resource allocation grows, your data mobility strategy inherently becomes more critical. Data mobility, in effect, now equates to computing mobility.

Leveraging the “Supercomputer” in the Cloud

Data mobility becomes even more imperative as entities gain more opportunities to take advantage of “supercomputing” capabilities.

The computing power that exists in the cloud now is tremendous, and thanks to modern dynamic cloud pricing, even smaller organizations can tap into it. According to one estimate, the cloud-based high-performance computing market should reach $55 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 7% from 2023 to 2030.

So for example, if you’re a FinTech startup, you could pay by the minute to leverage high-performance computing capabilities to test your trading algorithm. Previously, these powerful capabilities were only available to the biggest customers — think NASA — and came with astronomical costs.

On-Premise Solutions Aren’t Going Away

Even as cloud services and capabilities become more accessible and more valuable, on-premise operations aren’t going to disappear. Customers have all kinds of reasons for keeping data on-premise, whether it’s for compliance purposes, costs or the desire to leverage existing infrastructure. Certain workloads, meanwhile, simply don’t make as much sense on the cloud.

The reality is that even the most compelling alternatives couldn’t eliminate on-premise operations, because business ecosystems and industries evolve organically. Think about it: Many businesses still use landlines, and workers still use desktop computers. Nearly half a century after marketers first coined the term the “paperless office,” it took a full-blown pandemic to push our collaboration tools to the point where we are finally, basically, paperless.

Fiber Channel and iSCSI

When it comes to data mobility, how does an organization decide whether to adopt fiber, iSCSI or both? As organizations manage workloads that require low latency and other networking capabilities, they’re going to be investing heavily in this area.

Traditionally, a significant amount of data management is fiber-channel-based. With iSCSI, an organization doesn’t need to invest in separate physical infrastructure, such as switches or cables. Moreover, iSCSI has become more attractive to entities moving workloads to the cloud. A whole range of products, from Pure Storage, NetApp and even cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, offer iSCSI-based storage in the cloud. Your data mobility strategy should consider how to move from fiber channel to iSCSI and back again.

Change is the Only Constant

Ultimately, no one can predict all of the major technological innovations that will impact their business down the road. To stay nimble, you need a data mobility strategy that you can execute with the team you have — whether their primary expertise is in storage, networking or elsewhere. This can be especially challenging in large organizations, with teams that have to meticulously plan their projects and stay accountable for their budgets. Now more than ever, it’s important to have a solid foundation on which to build a strategy that fits your needs.

September 15, 2023
Cisco Aligns With Nutanix on Hybrid Cloud Computing

Cisco and Nutanix this week announced a strategic partnership through which the two companies will collaborate to advance hybrid cloud computing.

As part of that agreement, Cisco is committing to making AHV virtual machine software from Nutanix available from the edge to the cloud, starting with the Cisco Unified Compute Systems (UCS) rack and, soon after, blade servers.

Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute, said via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Cisco will be able to centrally manage virtual machines from Nutanix alongside the other major virtual machines it already supports.

In addition, the partnership will enable Cisco to apply multiple forms of artificial intelligence (AI) across a hybrid cloud computing environment, he added.

Thomas Cornely, senior vice president of product management for Nutanix, said the goal is to provide IT teams with an opportunity to consolidate infrastructure across a hybrid cloud computing environment. In effect, Nutanix and Cisco are working toward converging the control planes across their entire respective portfolios, he added.

The goal is to enable IT teams to streamline the number of platforms that need to be supported as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT, said Cornely.

The issue that IT organizations regularly encounter is that each platform requires hiring additional IT personnel to manage. At a time when many organizations are encountering economic headwinds, there is a natural inclination to reduce the number of platforms as the size of the IT staff is reduced. Despite advances in automation, IT labor costs still represent the largest overall segment of any IT budget.

It’s not clear how aggressively IT teams are consolidating IT infrastructure to reduce costs, but after more than a decade of continuous investments in IT, many organizations are discovering they are supporting a wide range of platforms. During a downturn, however, IT teams tend to more aggressively eliminate “snowflake” platforms that require unique skillsets to manage, noted Cornely.

In the meantime, IT environments are also becoming more distributed as more workloads move to the network edge. Those workloads are not replacing applications running in on-premises or cloud computing environments, so the overall IT footprint will continue to increase. Given the chronic shortage of IT skills, the only way to effectively manage that IT estate will be to rely more on automation frameworks increasingly infused with AI.

Each IT organization will need to determine for itself what level of automation to embrace, but Cisco is betting most will opt to rely on a SaaS platform provided by a vendor versus building and maintaining an IT management platform themselves. Regardless, legacy approaches that depend heavily on manual processes will increasingly give way to cloud-based platforms that can more easily manage workloads wherever they happen to be deployed.

The issue now, as always, is funding the transition to new platforms to bring the total cost of IT back under control and eventually pay for themselves.

August 31, 2023