Hybrid Cloud - Key Benefits & Must Have Requirements : Gartner says by 2020, a corporate "No-Cloud" Policy will be as rare as a "No-Internet" policy is today as per this article and specifically the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market is projected to continue to grow more than 25 percent per year through 2019. This surge in cloud adoption also represents a huge shift in cloud spending by IT organizations, directly or indirectly affecting more than $1 trillion dollars in Cloud IT purchases by 2020, according to Gartner.

1. Hybrid Cloud - Key Benefits & Must Have Requirements
Gartner says by 2020, a corporate "No-Cloud" Policy will be as rare as a "No-
Internet" policy is today as per this article and specifically the Infrastructure as
a Service (IaaS) market is projected to continue to grow more than 25 percent
per year through 2019. This surge in cloud adoption also represents a huge
shift in cloud spending by IT organizations, directly or indirectly affecting more
than $1 trillion dollars in Cloud IT purchases by 2020, according to Gartner.
Of course, not every enterprise app and data bit will move fully to the cloud.
To quote yet another study—this one by North Bridge Venture Partners and
GigaOM Research—many of these deployments will be hybrid in nature. For
enterprises and smaller organizations alike, it's essential to build a cloud
strategy that adopts public and private cloud resources, on-premise systems,
containers, and more. Research confirms that more than half of enterprises
will take this approach.

2. Increasing adoption of hybrid clouds makes it critical for technology leaders to
strategically develop the ability to manage them, and implement cloud
management capabilities to address business challenges.
Key Benefits of a Hybrid Cloud
1. The mix-and-match nature of hybrid IT solutions allow organizations to
define and implement the right mix of technologies for them. Specifically
deploying what they need and where they need it, is the primary benefit for
this cloud model.
2. The control, familiarity and security that come with on-premise IT solutions
is balanced with the flexibility, scalability and economies of scale that come
with managed hosting, public cloud services. Instead of having to adopt a one-
size-fits-all approach, IT requirements can be delivered to exact specification
and preference, by considering business size, structure, location and budget.
3. One of the key benefits of a hybrid cloud is provisioning at a lower cost and
high speed (as and when required functionality of the public cloud component)
The ability to deploy to any infrastructure, of their choice, based on their needs
and in an agile manner is of significance to the IT Manager. IT and DevOps
especially emphasize on the ability to respond to changing business
requirements by speeding up the delivery of core technology services with the
flexibility to use a mix of multiple cloud models - private, hosted or public
based on their security, compliance, scalability and performance needs.
Requirements from the Hybrid IT Managers
1. For operating a hybrid cloud model the underlying application, integrations
and data architectures need to be revisited, sometimes tweaked, while other
times overhauled. New tools for deployment, monitoring, and management
are required. Managers in charge of maintaining the Hybrid IT environments,
seek to ensure the availability of the complex set of skills, tools and processes
needed to manage hybrid infrastructure on a consistent, global scale.

3. 2. The management and optimization of a hybrid IT infrastructure is proving to
be a challenge. While, IT teams must develop new skills to collaborate more
closely, several of them would also like to leverage the skills of the experienced
and expert managed technology services providers who can design and deliver
optimized hybrid IT solutions at a quicker pace.
3. As enterprises adopt more and more cloud-based applications, they need to
be able to provision and de-provision both apps and users fast enough to keep
up with business requirements, while maintaining tight security and
compliance through identity management. Managers aim to ensure data
governance by restricting access to resources through RBAC mechanism where
users and groups can be granted different roles and assign permissions to
those roles.
4. Support for Authentication and access management methods are necessary
to ensure users use their corporate accounts for Single Sign On (SSO) to enable
increased visibility, auditing, and control over access to cloud resources.
Whether it's provisioning, meeting compliance requirements, or simply
reducing the number of help desk calls, SSO plays an integral role in efficient
enterprise IAM.
5. Regular users of infrastructure resources seek simplified orchestration and
templates that allow operators to configure a server once and reuse that
configuration reliable and repeatable to provision more servers. This avoids
repetitive manual tasks when the DevOps staff could be adding value to the
business and has the added benefit to restrict the service availability and
resource types to what's available in the stack.

4. 6. Enterprises seek to place accountability and ownership on the cloud users by
enforcing an abstract grouping mechanism like 'Resource based Tagging' that
can be used to associate resources with a particular department or functional
team.

5. 7. Cloud resources can be spread among many cloud services making it hard to
track and account. This problem is compounded with the fact that workers
may engage cloud services without the IT department's knowledge. Thus,
Shadow IT is not just a risk but actual issue to deal with. The IT team should
have tools to avoid shadow IT by having access to a centralized pane of glass
that adheres to the first rule of data governance - to know what you have and
where it is.

6. 8. IT Managers rely on useful and timely data about the utilization statistics of
cloud resources to make the decisions necessary to optimize cost and usage.
They will use this information to optimize and find the "best execution venues"
for cloud workloads by weighing factors like performance, reliability, cost and
security and then matching appropriate solutions to enterprise priorities.

8. 9. Enterprise seek automated policies, rules and schedulers to keep costs from
spiraling up, by automatically shutting down QA and Dev servers outside of
business hours or terminating un-used volumes to reduce costs, and
automatically right sizing the VMs based on their monitored utilization.
Automated alerts and notifications about authorization failures, budget
overruns, cost spikes, un-tagged infrastructure result in increased visibility and
accountability to the Enterprise stakeholders.
10. Stakeholder need to access Dashboards with real-time actionable data. The
visibility gained into the cloud consumption patterns enables analysis in terms
of the cost implications, usage trends, performance thresholds, and security
implications. This provides managers with an opportunity to evaluate and
optimize the infrastructure across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
11. Finally, organizations require automated IT showback and chargeback
capabilities that provide timely, accurate transparency into how your IT
resources are being consumed, who's consuming them, and at what cost – all
rolled up into a single bill of IT.
If the above needs of the Hybrid IT are addressed, then Enterprises can realize
not only IT cost savings and efficiencies, but also overall business growth
objectives, and increased agility and innovation by leverage the flexible
scalability of public clouds, along with the security and control of their own
private infrastructure.
Hybrid Cloud Management with Jamcracker
Jamcracker integrates the disparate cloud environments and allows you to
control your cloud resources with purpose built automation, orchestration,
policy enforcement and management tools. With an easy to install and manage
virtual appliance, Jamcracker helps IT to rein in cloud sprawl while enterprises
adopt cloud services across the organisation and allows an evolution to the
cloud that delivers incremental IT value each step along the way and enables
organizations firmly in control of their own technology strategy.