Cloud first is dead—cloud smart is what’s happening now.

Not every application is meant for the cloud. Enterprises need to make optimal use of their on-prem infrastructure at the same time they leverage the benefits of the public cloud.

Hybrid cloud, meaning some on-premises and some off-premises, is already the default architecture for IT and has been for a while now. However, until this point, the hybrid has been seen as that interim state on a journey to what many might condescendingly call “cloud maturity” en route to the full public cloud. But now it seems IT leaders realise that hybrid may not be a transitory state—it may be the preferred state.

More customers are looking at hybrid as a permanent state because of the welcome flexibility it brings to IT, allowing organisations to use existing architecture in their data center while still taking advantage of the cloud’s benefits to optimise costs and extend on-premises IT capabilities.

Hybrid’s popularity is also getting a boost from companies that are predominantly on premises, but eager to exploit the latest technology found in cloud models. Organisations need greater processing power as they turn to advances such as AI to help them process and analyse data faster and more efficiently. The cloud route offers enterprises a flexible and scalable way to meet these increasing processing needs without needing to invest in costly hardware, while also addressing cybersecurity concerns. This is an excellent use of the public cloud.

But this isn’t a transition you can navigate without careful planning. If you’re too hasty, you might move things into the cloud that will leave you saddled with a negative ROI. Some companies still get tripped up by failing to do proper planning and wind up moving the wrong workloads to the cloud, forcing them to backtrack and start again from scratch. 

Infrastructure as an afterthought

Why do some migrations fail? What often happens is infrastructure teams are forced to scramble to keep up with the demands and requirements as applications get moved to the public cloud. The net result is an inefficient hodgepodge of a solution that hurts performance.

That’s because cloud projects are usually driven by software architects who often map out these projects without involvement or feedback from the organisation’s infrastructure architects—with predictable results. Cloud masterfully abstracts the performance-impacting nature of infrastructure realities, and software architects are all too keen to believe this apparent absence is the actual absence of anything to worry about. However, that is often not the case.

The goal should always be to put the right workload with the right data into the right place. However, some types of workloads are not going to work well in the cloud because they don’t translate well to a microservices architecture with higher latency from network, storage, and inter-services messaging. In those instances, perhaps the best decision is to leave things as they are for some applications. As one customer once said to me, “Sometimes monolithic is optimal.”

Straightening this out—and better optimising hybrid cloud deployments to find the right balance—requires better communication between the infrastructure and software architecture teams. This will take some doing considering that developers have usually spearheaded cloud initiatives inside their organisations.

The case for hybrid cloud

There’s an urgency to fix this sooner rather than later because hybrid cloud demand is kicking into high gear. More than three-quarters of enterprises now use two or more cloud providers, and one-third have more than 50% of their workloads in the cloud.

Further, both on-premises and public cloud investment are only expected to increase in the coming years, with Gartner predicting that end-user spending on public cloud services will reach nearly £600 billion this year.

A hybrid cloud is a way for organisations to leverage the benefits of both public and private clouds as they move their workloads. Further, the hybrid offers more options to host workloads—whether that be on-premises, in a hosted private cloud, or a public cloud. That flexibility also contributes to a more optimised IT infrastructure and lower costs as companies optimise resource allocation and improve the performance of their cloud infrastructure.

Companies also stand to reap a security bonus by being able to leverage the security benefits of public and private clouds. With private clouds, they gain more control over security. In the public cloud, they benefit from more advanced security approaches. 

Many organisations are also looking at hybrid cloud to cap skyrocketing monthly public cloud bills, a challenge exacerbated by cloud sprawl, where organisations operate several different clouds for the same or similar workloads instead of matching the right workload to the right cloud. Further, the cloud storage costs associated with managing all that data add strain on corporate budgets at a time when CFOs are in no mood for financial surprises.

Pay as you go is great—provided you understand exactly how you “go.” Otherwise, you may be paying for something different than what you intended. This is particularly true of storage, which tends to be long-lived and steadily growing, the worst of combinations for pay-as-you-go.

Cloud smart vs. cloud first

So, is cloud-first dead? I think for the most part it is. And it’s being replaced by the cloud smart movement. Cloud smart involves making the best use of cloud concepts whether they are on premises or off and fundamentally making the most rational choice of locality as part of the thinking.

A cloud-smart architectural approach is essential because it enables enterprises to optimise their on-premises IT infrastructure and leverage the benefits of the cloud as well. With cloud smart architecture, enterprises can design and deploy highly available, scalable, and resilient solutions that have cloud operating characteristics to adapt to their changing business needs.

After the initial rush to the public cloud, this belated dose of reality is a positive. It reflects the recognition that there needs to be a smarter balance right between what's on-premises vs. what's in the public cloud. Knowing how to strike the right balance—with the understanding that not every application is meant for the cloud—can ensure that you optimise performance, reliability, and cost, driving better long-term outcomes for your organisation.

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