Adopting a hybrid cloud strategy offers you the flexibility to move workloads to the infrastructure that makes the most sense and to take advantage of all the benefits of various public cloud vendors and private cloud as well. But what if the strategy that you put into place isn’t working for you anymore? Here are 3 signs that it’s time to rethink your hybrid cloud strategy that you should keep an eye out for:
1. Complaints About Performance and Speed
Angry customers, long wait times, and unstable performance – oh my! If your end-users are starting to complain about how unpredictable the performance is — or how long it takes to generate reports, duplicate environments, respond to customers, or even just do normal, everyday business processes – it might be time to rethink your strategy. Perhaps you’ve moved a mission-critical workload that needs a lot of performance onto the public cloud for agility reasons. Or maybe your workload use to run normal, until the amount of data grew and changes were made in the workflow. Whatever the reason, you’re discovering that you are no longer getting the performance that you need. If you are starting to notice that your end-users are getting increasingly frustrated, take a look at what infrastructure your workloads live on and try to determine if there is a way to increase performance or if it would be more cost-efficient to move to another environment.
2. Cloud Bill Is Getting Out of Control
Which leads us to our second point: if you’re frequently suffering from sticker shock when you receive your public cloud bill, it’s time to rethink your cloud strategy. You know what workloads you are putting into the public cloud. And if you are pushing for even higher levels of performance, you know that you are going to pay dearly for it. But there are other factors that can affect your cloud bill. Snapshots and clones can eat up capacity, as can a growth in data. Dev/test environments you spun up “temporarily” but never shut down can quickly affect the bottom line. If your public cloud bill has become wildly unpredictable, you need to take a closer look at what exactly you have in the cloud, how to reduce this cost, or if there is a more cost-efficient option available.
3. Your Applications Are Failing in Their New Environment
There are many ways to move applications to the public cloud. 1) You can refactor them for the specific environment you are planning to use. This ensures you get maximum efficiency, but it also takes a lot of time, money, effort, and risk. And when you’re done, you’re essentially “locked-in” to your vendor (unless you choose to refactor again). 2) You can lift and shift applications to the cloud, which is much faster, but also doesn’t allow you to take advantage of the cloud vendor’s functionalities and scalability that comes natively. And in some cases, a lift and shift is just not possible. Or 3) You can modernize with containers, which allow you to strategically use key components of a complex application in the cloud without running the entire operating environment.
Whichever option you choose, there is risk involved. Regardless of how you got to the cloud, if the migration is taking more time and budget than you had planned, then it’s obviously time to reevaluate your cloud migration strategy.
The Solution
Investing in a Cloud Data Platform is the solution to any of the above cost, performance, or migration issues that you might be having. By decoupling the data from the underlying infrastructure, a Cloud Data Platform provides easy mobility of data between different environments. Refactoring doesn’t need to make or break your career, and the ability to move mission-critical apps doesn’t need to be such a headache anymore.
A Cloud Data Platform offers significantly improved performance than the public cloud vendors – as much as 10x performance. And with licensing that doesn’t link performance and capacity, you never have to worry about paying for capacity you don’t want to achieve the levels of performance you need. Finally, with rich data services that you can usually only get on-prem, such as deduplication, snapshots, and zero-footprint clones, you are able to minimize the capacity that you are using – resulting in a further cost savings.
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