Top 7 Best Practices For Hybrid Cloud Automation in 2024

End-user spending on the shift to the public cloud was estimated to be $1.3 trillion in 2022, and it is expected to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025¹ Despite the recent trend to shift to a public cloud, it may not be the best choice for all businesses. For example, companies operating on legacy applications or those dealing with sensitive data daily may not prefer the public cloud. 

On the other hand, the limitations of on-premise systems do not allow companies to stay competitive and scale up when needed. This is where hybrid cloud automation comes into the picture. This article will delve into the best practices for hybrid cloud automation.

What is hybrid cloud & automation?

Hybrid cloud is a practice that combines on-premise infrastructure with private and public cloud services for an efficient IT structure. Hybrid cloud automation refers to the orchestration or streamlining of workflows across these different environments. For example, hybrid cloud automation enhances the accessibility of data across the enterprise. Data saved in data centers can be shared with the software operating on the cloud, decreasing the manual labor and the time spent on data transfer. 

Why do companies choose hybrid cloud? 

• Sensitive information: Hybrid cloud approach allows businesses to protect their sensitive data in on-premise storage or private cloud while using the public cloud for workloads requiring less security.
• Legacy tools: These are a significant part of operations for many businesses. Hybrid cloud enables companies to keep using their legacy tools while benefiting from the speed and flexibility of cloud technology. This also reduces the costs of replacing the legacy system and helps companies stay competitive in the face of change.
• Expanding capacity: Hybrid cloud approach enables enterprises to enhance the capacity of their on-premise systems by adding a public cloud without making further investments in their infrastructure.
• Reduced Costs: Companies can avoid significant initial investments in expanding on-premise servers. It is cost-efficient as cloud services charge per user or have a pay-as-you-go system. 

What are the leading hybrid cloud automation tools?

Hybrid cloud automation tools need to be capable of:

• Automating resource provisioning in different clouds and on-premise
• Providing low-code UIs for broad accessibility. This is not a must but can help increase adoption.
• Scalability for enterprise-grade workloads

Check out leading job schedulers that provide this functionality.

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Stonebranch provides a comprehensive workload automation tool that allows organizations to coordinate, oversee, and streamline IT tasks from a unified platform. It delivers oversight of workflows regardless of the data location, covering various platforms and business software. Users can design workflows using its drag-and-drop interface and can manage their organization’s workload.

Stonebranch facilitates integration with platforms or applications using its pre-existing integrations. Moreover, users have the option to craft their own or make use of community-contributed integration templates from the Stonebranch Integration Hub. The tool also features visual dashboards and detailed reports, ensuring timely insights and SLA tracking.

Best practices in hybrid cloud automation

1. Ensure visibility into data management 

Many of the automation tools on the market provide visibility into data management as data solutions or visibility as part of their software. However, these tools are designed to work in a single environment: on-premise or in the cloud. Using different automation tools for each system and manually combining the data would be too costly and lead to delays in business intelligence.

Businesses must use cloud management platforms or workload automation software to provide their IT department and developers with enhanced visibility from a centralized control point. End-to-end automation would not only solve the problem of visibility but also would have higher ROI as the management can eliminate some of the other tools used in each environment for such purposes. 

Explore data management automation in more detail.

2. Enhance the capacity of on-premise legacy applications 

Cloudbursting techniques can help businesses enhance the capacity of their on-premise legacy application with the help of cloud technology. Cloudbursting is a cloud computing strategy that involves running applications in a private cloud or data center and “bursting” into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes. The advantage of such a hybrid cloud approach is that an organization only pays for extra computing resources when they are needed.

Businesses use cloudbursting deployment techniques to control a sudden increase in IT demand to prevent service interruptions. When an application hosted on-premises exceeds the local resources, configuration, or infrastructure as code (IaC) tools automatically trigger cloudbursting and expands to the public cloud.

For example, let us consider a web application for taxi ordering that operates on a private cloud. On busy days like holidays, web traffic increases significantly when people order taxis more often. The sudden increase in web traffic can cause disruptions or slow-downs in the service. However, as the web traffic of the application is not always so high, the return on investment for expanding capacity is very low. This is where companies can benefit from cloud bursting. The extra traffic can “burst out” to the public cloud, eliminating disruptions.

3. Simplify Complex IT infrastructure management and lengthy deployment cycle 

Hybrid cloud management requires managers to be experts in numerous fields because of its complex multi-environment characteristic. Alongside on-premise computing, they must have expertise in private and public clouds that operate different tools and solutions. 

Use end-to-end orchestration to allow developers to coordinate complicated software stacks across the enterprise. Orchestration provides centralized management over on-premise, private, and public cloud computing and facilitates integrations reducing product-release cycles.

An example of end-to-end orchestration technology could be workload automation solutions. Workload automation is the process of centralizing and automating the scheduling, initiation, and monitoring of business processes and transactions across physical, virtual, and cloud systems using the software. 

4. Align your operations with regulatory compliances

Regulatory compliances complicate the data storage process in the hybrid cloud as the regulations governing data storage differ based on the data type. Automation tools such as workload automation tools, RPA ensure the correct allocation of data storage to on-premise or cloud servers based on different regulations such as GLBA, HIPAA, COPPA, and so on. 

Another reason for the complication of regulatory issues is the difficulty of tracking the changes in different environments. Automation tools like workload automation enable tracing the changes made across the enterprise and ensure that every change made by the employees is according to the regulatory compliances. 

5.Define and implement an automation strategy

Hybrid cloud environments can be highly complex, spanning multiple services, platforms, and providers. Before automating processes, you should define a clear automation strategy that aligns with your business objectives, architectural principles, and desired outcomes. Your strategy should include understanding what to automate, when to automate, and how to measure the effectiveness of automation. Without a comprehensive strategy, you risk implementing automation in a piecemeal or haphazard way that could create more problems than it solves.

6.Focus on configuration management

As hybrid cloud infrastructures continue to grow in complexity, so does the importance of maintaining a consistent configuration across your environments. Automation tools can be used to define your configurations as code, which can then be versioned, tested, and applied consistently across your environments. This reduces the risk of configuration drift and human error, improves your deployments’ repeatability, and helps ensure that your applications and services are always running in a known and expected state.

7. Maintain an iterative approach

Implementing automation is not a one-time effort but a continuous process of improvement. Start with automating simple, repetitive tasks and gradually move to more complex operations as your team becomes more comfortable with the tools and processes. Regularly review and update your automation strategy to ensure it aligns with your business objectives and technological landscape

Hybrid Cloud Automation FAQ

For more on Workload Orchestration:

• Workload Automation: Guide to Benefits & Challenges
• 8 Workload Automation Use Cases for SAP
• Workload Automation vs RPA: 3 differences you need to know

For guidance on choosing the right solution, get in touch with us:

External Links

• 1. Gartner. “Gartner Says More Than Half of Enterprise IT Spending in Key Market Segments Will Shift to the Cloud by 2025”