The benefits of using the cloud are undeniable—from reduced infrastructure costs and license fees to increased scalability and agility. But, while every company has some variation of a cloud strategy on their roadmap, the move to the cloud is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. Most often, it’s a gradual implementation because some processes must still run on-premises or in a private cloud, while others can more easily and compliantly be supported in the public cloud.
Organizations are becoming more and more comfortable with a hybrid model because it makes good business sense—combining the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud with the option to keep more complex applications on-premises. There are many reasons why businesses may want to combine on-premises and cloud instances, from specific policies relating to where data can be stored, to having previously purchased on-premises solutions, to a future-focused strategy that integrates more and more cloud opportunities. In fact, a 2014 report by Infonetics Research confirms that hybrid cloud is becoming the “new normal” as adoption among enterprises was expected to more than double by 2015.
Hybrid Is the New Normal
This new normal is your new challenge: managing a hybrid environment that consists of private and public clouds and on-premises IT infrastructures. No longer are you responsible for just managing on-premises solutions within your own borders. Now you have to manage applications across the cloud as well. To effectively meet this challenge, you’ll need visibility into all of the pieces of this increasingly diverse environment.
Visibility Into the Hybrid Environment
Visibility across on-premises and cloud deployments is the key to navigating the shifting tide of IT management in the hybrid world because you cannot manage what you cannot see. You’ll need visibility across the environment to gain an understanding of cloud workloads and to ensure service levels, security and compliance.
In addition, you’ll need this visibility into what’s happening and why so that you can determine whether your hybrid environment is functioning as you had intended. If any of the applications that have moved to cloud aren’t performing as expected, you need to know so that you can modify your strategy. When you have refined your strategy and the workloads you’re running in the cloud are as reliable and secure as they were on-premises, you’ll want visibility into that as well, so you’ll feel ready to begin transitioning more and more workloads to the cloud.
Hybrid In the Real World: Gatwick Airport
One organization that maintains visibility and compliance through a hybrid model is Gatwick Airport. Among its other cloud solutions, Gatwick integrated Splunk Cloud into its operations to supplement its existing on-premises solution. In doing so, the team realized that combining ops data in this cloud solution gave them the agility and scalability they needed, while providing insight into airport performance. The world’s busiest single-runway airport now benefits from a seamless hybrid environment that allows them to better monitor on-time performance, optimize gates and terminals, improve predictability, manage security wait lines, reduce rail and road incidents, and more.
Like other major changes in business and technology, embracing the new normal of hybrid will require a shift in mindset and corporate culture. The good news is that on-premises and cloud solutions can operate at full capacity and very much in hybrid harmony—as long as there is the right level of visibility, monitoring and insight.
Find out more about how Splunk solutions can give you visibility across your hybrid environment.
