In the previous post, we mentioned that Red Hat was named a leading vendor in the recent Forrester Wave report for private cloud software suites. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure enables organizations to build an open, scalable private cloud that delivers high performance and simplifies management and administration. Red Hat was also recognized as a leader in the Forrester Wave for hybrid cloud management platforms. According to Forrester, Red Hat is one of the “top choices for developer and DevOps teams concerned mainly with building applications that run across multiple clouds.”
Making Sense of Cloud Solutions
In a hybrid cloud, public and private cloud infrastructures operate independently of one another, but they have the ability to communicate and securely share data, applications and workloads. This makes it possible, for example, to store sensitive data or run mission-critical workloads on a private cloud while “borrowing” computing resources from the public cloud to meet application requirements. Instead of making capital investments to account for peak periods, pay as you go for the resources you use.
With a hybrid cloud, organizations can choose where workloads are hosted, taking advantage of the control and security of a private cloud and the scalability and cost-efficiency of the public cloud. This is especially important for highly regulated industries that are subject to increasingly complex requirements about data storage, retention, and access.
Also, not all workloads can be migrated to a public cloud. For example, suppose a workload uses a legacy application that runs on a certain version of an operating system that isn’t supported by a public cloud. In this case, the organization will need to maintain a private cloud deployment until that workload is retired. The processing of big data is another important use case, as important data can be stored in a private cloud and analytics queries can be run in the public cloud.
The hybrid cloud appeals to IT teams because it allows them to spend less time on firefighting and keeping the lights on, and more time on strategic initiatives. End-user requirements are more quickly and easily supported, and security and compliance are less of a headache.
Despite all of these benefits, hybrid cloud doesn’t always deliver ROI. In a survey from The Bunker, nearly two-thirds of CIOs and IT decision-makers said their hybrid cloud deployments failed to meet expectations. Primary reasons were a lack of in-house expertise, poor advice, and a lack of integration of cloud and non-cloud resources. These failures point to the need for effective hybrid cloud management tools and policies related to access controls, cost reporting, software configuration, and policy-based automation.
Red Hat CloudForms
Red Hat CloudForms is a unified cloud management platform for a hybrid cloud environment that eliminates the need for multiple management tools, redundant policies and additional staff to handle administration. CloudForms delivers consistent user experiences and functionality across all clouds, automates provisioning, policy enforcement and remediation, and enables workload lifecycle management, including reconfiguration and retirement of workloads. Administrators have visibility and control of all cloud infrastructures within the same system so workloads can be continuously monitored, discovered and tracked.
As a Red Hat Partner, Technologent is uniquely qualified to help organizations implement Red Hat’s open-source solutions such as CloudForms. Let us show you how a hybrid cloud can provide greater flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency and help you meet your business and IT objectives.
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