Why Your Hybrid Cloud Strategy Isn’t Working

Enterprises want the best of both worlds, which is why they’re increasingly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud strategies to take advantage of what both public and private cloud providers have to offer and build powerful, modern applications. The hybrid cloud market is expected to grow to $97.64 billion by 2023—quite the uptick from the $44.6 billion the market realized in 2018. 

Today, more than 65% of organizations use hybrid cloud environments. Not only does a hybrid cloud infrastructure enable companies to leverage the scalability the public cloud delivers, it also lets them use existing private cloud infrastructures to keep sensitive data protected. Since a lot of enterprises have already invested in private cloud or on-prem data centers, hybrid cloud allows enterprises to leverage existing investments in on-prem and/or private cloud, and this recipe provides the ideal environment to support modern applications.

Like anything else, though, you can’t just decide to jump on the hybrid cloud bandwagon and get great results. To achieve your goals, you need a well-thought-out strategy—and you need to execute on it with precision. 

The good news is that you don’t have to build your hybrid cloud strategy out of thin air. Check out these four common reasons such strategies fail so you can avoid the mistakes other organizations have made.

Mistake #1: You Don’t Have a Strategy to Begin With

Companies that haven’t yet embraced the hybrid cloud tend to run their applications on-premises. As such, they risk getting left in the dust by their faster-moving competitors getting all the benefits of the cloud.

When you’re buying a house or renting an apartment, you don’t put a blindfold on and throw a dart at a map and let random chance guide you. Instead, you spend a lot of time figuring out what you’re looking for and where, specifically, you want to live, and why, and how you will make the move. 

Likewise, you also need a strategy to move to hybrid cloud. By putting together a comprehensive plan to transition to hybrid cloud, you significantly increase the chances you ultimately end up achieving the objectives you’re hoping for, which is to seamlessly and easily build modern applications that delight your customers. 

Mistake #2: You Are Locked-In by Your Cloud Vendor

If your organization runs on the AWS ecosystem and all of a sudden Amazon gobbles up your top competitor, now Amazon has become your top competitor—and now you are paying them to host your systems, and your data. 

In such a scenario, wouldn’t you want to have the autonomy to move your data to another cloud provider without a huge costly development effort?

Unfortunately, many companies don’t consider vendor lock-in when devising a cloud strategy. There’s an easy fix: Look for solutions that let you take your data and applications wherever you want.

Mistake #3: You Don’t Have the Right Database in Place

A hybrid cloud strategy requires a data management strategy, especially in large enterprises. Eager to move to the hybrid cloud, however, many enterprises look past the nuts and bolts of migration and instead look to make the transition as quickly as possible. 

One thing that’s often overlooked is the database itself. If you expect your hybrid cloud strategy to deliver ROI, you need to ensure data is managed consistently from any location, all the time, and that you don’t end up with even more harmful data silos from your hybrid cloud endeavor. This requires an underlying database built to power modern applications. 

Mistake #4: You Don’t Have the Right Team in Place

Hybrid cloud strategy and implementation require a variety of skill sets to succeed. Some companies make a top-down mandate to have hybrid cloud apps with no additional vision, plan, or support. Others set a bottom-up mission to build hybrid cloud apps with the desire to up-level tech skills but without the vision of how hybrid cloud truly benefits the business and thus no way to convince the top brass to move forward. A strategy that is not grounded in a realistic implementation plan will struggle to get off the ground.

Having the right people to map “how our business must change” to “why hybrid cloud” to “how we roll out hybrid cloud at our company with our apps and our data” will accelerate you to the benefits hybrid cloud architectures bring.

Bottom line: making hybrid cloud real is a cross-functional effort requiring talented people. DataStax’s solution architects have taken this journey with companies many times before and help customers every day with their hybrid cloud implementation and strategy. 

Avoid These Mistakes to Unlock the Full Promise of Hybrid Cloud

The more time you invest in developing a hybrid cloud strategy ahead of your migration, the more likely your efforts will succeed. 

As you begin creating your strategy, look for solutions that enable you to avoid vendor lock-in, and choose a flexible database and open source tools that support your data management goals.

Do all that, and you can start building transformative applications that increase employee productivity and help you deliver superior user experiences to your customers every time.