In my last post , I offered five steps for ensuring a disastrous deployment of hybrid cloud infrastructure. Below are a few more pieces of advice that you can take with a grain of salt (unless you’d like your deployment to fail).
Step No. 6: Forget About TCO
The first question corporate management will ask about any IT project—and particularly one as highly visible as hybrid cloud—will be: “How much is this thing going to cost us?” There are many ways to answer that question, such as:
A. “A helluva lot!”
B. “Beats me.”
C. “Only time will tell.”
D. “Unfortunately, no one will ever know the answer to that question. It is one of the great mysteries of the universe.”
Be creative—just don’t tell the truth about how the hybrid cloud can significantly improve TCO and reduce capital expenses, and don’t mention how important it is to work with the right partner company to measure and monitor TCO.
Step No. 7: Don’t Ask about Your Public Cloud Provider’s Security
More than 50% of respondents to InformationWeek’s 2013 State of Cloud Computing survey cited security as their top cloud risk.. Although there are many in-depth questions you can ask about the security practices of your public cloud supplier—everything from their technologies to their policies to the ways in which they ensure the protection of data as it moves between public and private clouds—asking those questions will only ease the concerns of management. We advocate a “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy when it comes to security.
Step No. 8: No Need to Understand Which Workloads to Run
Take the ludicrous posture that all workloads are basically the same and there’s no need to do an analysis of which workloads to run in the private cloud, the public cloud or the hybrid cloud. You know that’s not true, of course, but it will lead to hybrid cloud failure which, indeed, is our mission here.
Step No. 9: Assume Your Needs Will Never Change
Hybrid cloud success requires constant adjustments as the needs of the business change. If you want to fail, start with the assumption that you won’t be adding new services, bandwidth requirements will remain static, whatever storage capacity you put in place will stay the same, there will be no new applications, etc. We promise your hybrid cloud initiative won’t make it till the end of the week.
Step No. 10: For Heaven’s Sakes, DON’T Hire Experts to Help You
There are companies such as GRTI (a certified Master Cloud Builder) that have valuable insight and experience in making hybrid cloud initiatives successful in a wide range of environments and industries. Partnering with a company like GTRI will make it much more likely that your hybrid cloud initiative will be successful in reducing costs and driving the business forward.
Hybrid cloud is complex and strategic. It offers businesses the opportunity to reduce costs, improve agility and drive new business initiatives through big data analytics, enhanced mobility, elastic scalability, self-service resources and many more benefits.
Contact us today to learn more about success in the cloud. And download our white paper “Feeling Pressured to Move to the Hybrid Cloud?” for more on how to avoid these failures.
