5 Best Practices for Adopting Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

This article is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent report, “Hybrid Cloud: The Gateway to More Modern IT Infrastructure in DoD.” Download the full report here. 

By investing in enterprise-scale hybrid cloud, federal agencies, particularly DoD, can consolidate their workloads without cutting off resources and stifling application performance.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) allows agencies to more easily converge their services and operations between multiple clouds, including public and private offerings.

Some early cloud adopters have had difficulty detecting and adopting the appropriate hybrid cloud solution, bridging the gap between their agencies’ current and future IT solutions, and have caused strains on their ground personnel who were under-experienced in IT systems.

To avoid such pitfalls when adopting HCI, agencies should find a solution that is standardized and easy to deploy, avoid buying a solution that only solves one-off issues, apply controls to their hybrid cloud solution, choose a solution that meets current and future needs, and collaborate with a trusted partner.

Below we expand on ways to implement these tips.

1. Find a solution that is standardized and easy to deploy.

Look for a solution that is well known in the industry and commonly used across other government IT environments. In other words, don’t select a hyperconverged infrastructure provider that uses its own proprietary technology. Why? That creates more complexity for your agency and requires additional training for employees. Instead, look for hybrid cloud vendors that eliminate complexity and specialized training.

2. Don’t buy a solution that only solves one-off issues.

Choose a hybrid cloud solution that solves multiple problems instead of looking for a product to solve one problem. To get the most out of your solution, think broadly and consider how hybrid cloud can solve any infrastructure needs you have across the enterprise.

3. Apply controls to your hybrid cloud solution.

You need controls to help manage your each and every cloud workloads and ensure that the quality of services remain high for all of your applications and services. You need to identify a quality level of service that governs your hybrid cloud. For example, you need to have a minimum, maximum and burst control to ensure that any workload running in your hybrid cloud do not impact other services. Work with your data management vendor to determine if the solution allows you to allocate, manage and guarantee performance independently of capacity.

4. Choose a solution that meets current and future needs.

Selecting an agile hybrid cloud solution ensures that the technology can adapt to meet your agency’s current and future needs. There are executive orders and programmatic and project changes that agencies have to adhere to, and they need flexible solutions that can support those efforts.

Let’s say your agency closes a data center and needs to move resources from one facility to another location. Having an agile hybrid cloud infrastructure can enable those transitions and allow your agency to scale resources up or down. Independent scaling avoids costly and inefficient overprovisioning and simplifies capacity and performance planning.

5. Collaborate with a trusted partner.

The IT workforce is evolving, so having a trusted partner to complement your in-house expertise is vital. When you work with a trusted partner, you can determine the hybrid cloud solution that best meets your infrastructure needs and does not require a heavy lift to implement and use.

Working with a knowledgeable partner, agencies can become service providers. They can supply their sub-agencies with individual personal computing, networking and storage resources when and how they need them. Ultimately, that means agencies are freed up to become innovators — adopting new technologies and even creating their own as dynamics change

Want to learn more about how hybrid cloud can benefit? Download the full report here.