Enabling the Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft Technology

When I talk with customers about the Cloud, we always talk about a few key themes:

• Identity: I am convinced that you need to be able to federate your identity from your on premise solutions to the cloud. You will want to control the process of decommissioning an identity and want to make sure that of you have to lay somebody off, this person has no access to the data anymore – especially in the Public Cloud as this part of your infrastructure can be accessed from anywhere.
• Transparency: If you move to the public Cloud, you will want to have a certain level of transparency about how the software your business runs on is built and operated.
• Data Classification: A lot of customers raise concerns about having their data leaving their premises, especially if they leave the country. However, for a lot of data in your environment, most probably you do not really care as the data is not sensitive at all. Then there is data ("the keys to the bomb") you will never ever move to the public Cloud.

Especially the last point typically leads to a hybrid approach as you want to leverage the public Cloud (for the non-sensitive part of your data) and keep the sensitive data in a private Cloud.

Our French team just published a paper, which you will want to leverage, when you are in such a situation: Enabling Hybrid Cloud Today with Microsoft Technologies. To quote the abstract:

With the ambient credo to "do more with less, with a better agility and time to market", IT inevitably becomes a service provider for its enterprise and need to run like a business. The undertaking also requires a step further in the way the IT delivers its services to its customers: internal businesses and beyond. IT has indeed to deliver the services in an industrialized way for greater speed and lower cost. This requires increasing their overall core infrastructure operational maturity in two main areas.

The first one aims at improving the management of their own on-premises IT landscape and traditional services by evolving towards a private cloud, i.e. an optimized and more automated way to provision and operate (a catalog of) services for businesses. The second one consists in enhancing their service offerings by utilizing off-premises public cloud augmentations (for acceptable cases of use) as (lower-cost) add-ons to existing services in the catalog.

The combination and interaction of these two cloud paradigms results in the emergence of the hybrid cloud which meets the demands and the expectations of the business. Hybrid cloud spans the two above implementations. A service request can be instantiated in either implementation, or moved from one to another, or can horizontally grow between the two implementations (cloud bursting for instance).

This paper discusses how Microsoft can help your organization achieve a successful hybrid cloud strategy and present the enabling technologies from on-premises, cross-premises, and off-premises implementation of (parts of) the services. Several typical patterns and common scenarios are illustrated throughout this paper.

So, download and leverage it!

Roger