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Today, I would like to talk to you about which five major obstacles to solve in big data's good use of hybrid cloud. Many people may not know much about it. In order to make you understand better, the editor has summarized the following contents for you. I hope you can gain something according to this article.

Managing multiple cloud service providers in a single environment will face unique challenges. The editor describes how to ensure that an enterprise's hybrid cloud strategy is secure, coordinated, and cost-effective.

Over the past few years, companies have been moving more and more data, applications and development work to the cloud-a trend that has been significantly driven since the COVID-19 epidemic led to a surge in telecommuting and e-commerce activity.

Business organizations have been advancing the digital transformation and responding to the new challenges posed by this global health crisis and their impact on business processes, so they will launch or expand the hybrid cloud strategy like never before. IDG's recent research highlighted that because cloud platforms provide operational flexibility and much-needed home-office tools, they play a key role in helping business organizations cope with the crisis.

IDG surveyed 551 IT decision makers and found that more than half of enterprises now use multiple public cloud services, and 21% of respondents said they are using at least three cloud services.

However, operating and managing multiple cloud service providers and service-supported environments presents unique challenges. These obstacles need to be overcome if IT leaders and business leaders are to help business organizations succeed in the hybrid cloud era.

Identify the appropriate cloud services for the task at hand

When it comes to supporting specific applications, workloads, and business processes, not all cloud services are the same. Companies on the hybrid cloud path must struggle to figure out which cloud services are best suited for specific tasks.

CIO Samantha Liscio of the Canadian Workplace Safety and Insurance Commission (WSIB), which provides support and insurance for injured workers, said: "the first challenge we face is to identify, select and deploy the appropriate services in each cloud environment."

Since the end of 2017, WSIB has moved from its legacy IT infrastructure to the cloud. It worked with IT consulting and service provider Accenture to design and implement a transformation plan that includes cloud services, a new operational model that supports the cloud, and a more resilient digital service.

Today, WSIB operates a hybrid cloud environment that combines an integrated public cloud with its own private cloud. The cloud service providers it relies on include private cloud hosting providers for ServiceNow, Microsoft Azure and WSIB. The organization is using cloud services in a variety of applications, including employer financial reconciliation, identity management, digital portals for employee claims information, and claims processing.

"one of the difficult decisions that WSIB needs to make is to select tailored cloud services from a wide range of services offered by market-leading cloud service providers and to understand how they can be integrated into WSIB's broader hybrid cloud architecture," said Liscio.

In developing the overall infrastructure strategy, Accenture helped WSIB overcome this challenge by defining cloud service selection criteria and a cloud deployment decision framework. As a result, WSIB made an important strategic choice, Liscio said.

Combine the parts together

In many cases, hybrid cloud environments are replacing the proven and stable legacy IT infrastructure that has been in use for many years. To ensure the success of the transformation and to ensure that workflows are not disrupted, companies must combine cloud services in an orderly manner.

"the difficulty with hybrid cloud management is the ability to integrate and operate many technical solutions, standards, and service layers provided by different cloud vendors from a single place, often referred to as a single dashboard," said Liscio.

The infrastructure strategy developed by WSIB defines a set of key cloud management and operational functions, such as orchestration and automation, metering and billing, and predictive operations. This enables the organization to deploy these capabilities in an operational environment either directly or with the help of a cloud service provider.

Liscio said that as the technology landscape and architecture became increasingly complex, the challenge of ensuring that parts were brought together could become more daunting for technical and business leaders, making effective planning all the more important.

Accenture helped WSIB establish a hybrid cloud architecture to update existing aging technologies while introducing new digital services for end users. The organization has developed a hybrid cloud strategy to ensure optimal user experience and application availability for a variety of cloud technologies.

One of the key components of WSIB's hybrid cloud strategy is to support gateways that integrate enterprise applications across multiple clouds. "We have implemented a modern, extensible application programming interface (API) manager across the enterprise," Liscio said. "We need to adapt our environment to the future to ensure that it meets the requirements of hybrid cloud environments and the new technologies brought about by these environments."

Manage costs in a complex environment

One of the reasons companies are moving to the cloud is that they can reduce costs. For example, by reducing the number of servers or completely eliminating internally deployed data centers. But if it is not managed effectively, building a hybrid cloud environment can also be a costly project.

Medical information system provider WorldView is using Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) products.

It is very important to control costs. To better monitor these two cloud services and achieve cost control, WorldView deployed OpsCompass's cloud management software, which provides "dashboards" across the two platforms.

Marc Johnson, CIO, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Chief Compliance Officer of WorldView, said: "We can measure AWS and Azure services with a consistent mechanism, monitoring cost, accuracy and performance in one location. Without OpsCompass, our full-time staff costs would double. This includes recruiting people with experience on both platforms and the time it takes staff to manage them.

"to do this, we need a strict system and regulate our standards," Johnson said. We have standardized in all aspects in order to establish a benchmark link between the two platforms. In fact, we had to go back to the original lift-and-shift migration to organize, manage and standardize all application dependencies, and tag resources appropriately. Tagging resources enables business organizations to gain a deeper understanding of resource usage on different platforms and thus conduct more accurate analysis. "

It is important to keep the environment as simple as possible to reduce costs. "simplicity is critical," says Johnson. "the choices on each cloud platform greatly increase flexibility, but can come at a price if mismanaged."

Johnson says it is risky to allow hybrid cloud strategies and architectures to become increasingly complex by combining too many components. "just like an internally deployed architecture, the more components you have, the greater the risk," he says. "

Johnson says one way to simplify cloud computing is to use microservices as much as possible, but "sometimes core traditional applications tie us down in terms of what can be used as microservices."

Ensure data protection and privacy

When everything resides in a local environment, network security is challenging enough. It is even more challenging when data, applications, and platforms are stored in multiple places, including corporate data centers and multiple clouds.

Differences in security controls between different cloud services may increase the risk of data disclosure because the organization's internal security model needs to be applied to each cloud in different ways.

Navdeep Singh, vice president of cloud computing and web security at Fiserv, a financial services technology provider, participated in an CIO virtual round table in June 2020, when he specifically pointed out: "in a hybrid cloud environment, how do we ensure that the entire security architecture we have across the enterprise corresponds to distributed workloads in all regions?"

"at the same time, how can our people or anyone else access those environments in a consistent and repeatable way?" Singh said.

Indeed, controlling access is one of the biggest problems with hybrid cloud security. Jim Reavis, CEO of Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), an organization that provides cloud security education and best practices, said: "the common challenge for all hybrid cloud environments is to provide users with seamless access to cloud services based on their default login information, to maintain minimum access to all clouds, and to conduct risk assessment and review of additional cloud services."

"organizations should build and maintain a set of capabilities and knowledge base in using multiple clouds as a risk management strategy to better help organizations adapt to the future, as market trends make different clouds more or less attractive," Reavis said.

Reavis says enterprises need a strong cloud-centric identity architecture that can be combined with any cloud service of choice. "the need for cloud services to be compatible with open identity standards needs to be a procurement requirement," he said. Organizations need to translate their risk appetite for any cloud business requirements into the right resilience requirements. "

Reavis says critical business applications should be designed with appropriate redundancy, which is often achieved by orchestrating across multiple workloads. "ensuring the visibility and control of cloud services across the enterprise remains a pain point; one market trend we are seeing is the integration of cloud access security agent (CASB)-like solutions that traditionally manage access to SaaS applications with cloud workload management solutions running on the IaaS tier," he said.

Keep up with the speed of change

Cloud service providers often introduce new services and upgrades, and the entire market is very dynamic. The person in charge of IT and the person in charge of the business should keep abreast of the latest changes and adjust them as needed.

"We've known for a long time that the only constant in business is change," says Johnson. "the same applies to all kinds of cloud platforms." Cloud service providers, he says, are "constantly adding new features, eliminating other features, and creating new integration mechanisms."

WorldView's approach to this challenge is to maintain a learning environment. "the company has been encouraging my team to research new features, integrations and products to support the core vision and reduce risk," says Johnson. "once we find something promising, we include it in the proof of concept to narrow the selection."

Johnson said that after a lot of testing in an environment similar to a production environment, "our whole team will analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) from beginning to end."

This approach enables the company to figure out the best way to align cloud services with business needs with minimal risk. "We anticipate change and deal with it head on, rather than waiting for suppliers or platforms to solve this problem," Johnson said.

After reading the above, do you have any further understanding of the five major obstacles to be solved in big data's good use of hybrid cloud? If you want to know more knowledge or related content, please follow the industry information channel, thank you for your support.

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