Webinar Notes: The Hybrid Future Of Enterprise Cloud Adoption

For our first webinar series, we decided to focus on a viable complementary technology for companies who are thinking of taking their on premise application to pure Cloud. A hybrid application that splits its functions on the Cloud and on premise is often the right fit for many organizations, given the context of their respective application. Our agenda also focused on mitigating the risks and worries of enterprises that depend on Microsoft technologies. We highlight the potency (in numbers) of the Cloud solutions offered by Microsoft.

The topics that were covered in the webinar are as follows:

• What are the Drivers to move to Cloud?
• Is Cloud really attractive?
• Security Challenges and Models to go Hybrid
• Scenarios for Enterprises & SMBs to consider Cloud
• Risks & Worries

The webinar began with a slight primer on the background of on-premise technology as a whole with a particular focus on the poor PUE of 5 generations of the technology and operational costs. Other important factors that were discussed are as follows:

• 40% of businesses with on-premise systems hit by a disaster never reopen and 25% of businesses close within two years
• The average lifespan of a data center is usually 9 years after which, the entire set-up must be updated
• 84% of data Centers have issues with power, space, and uptime that negatively affected business operations
• Cannot take part in Cloud workloads:
  • eDiscovery
  • Office Graph
  • Video
  • Group
  • PowerBI
  • Updated UI
  • Browser/device suppor
• IT cloud improvements are not available (min role)
• You do your backup & disaster recovery

While there area high number of disadvantages that come with an on-premise system, the pros of having an on-premise data center were also discussed. They are as follows:

• Full control of farm configuration

“I know best how many servers I need”

• Can customize everything
• Can index and modify all data
• 100% control over uptime and failover

But the benefits listed above fails to convince anyone to that a purely on-premise system is an option. There should be little debate that the public cloud is the eventual future for almost every organization in the world.

Drivers to move to Cloud:

The Cloud has dramatically changed how we view/use data centers. Cloud has eliminated the on-premise mandate of owning the infrastructure to the role of consuming infrastructure. Managing different platforms is also done for. Now we just manage services. Extending legacy applications is no more. We just modernize workloads when Cloud is involved.

The other factors that make Cloud attractive is as follows:

• Perfect platform for enterprises with rapid data growth (average – 40% YoY)
• Relatively low storage cost and infrastructure sprawl
• Simplified data protection and disaster recovery plans
• Everything provided as a service with SLA
• Big data, machine learning, and business intelligence

Deployment Scenarios:

Moving an application to the Cloud is one the most important and financially liable decision that an enterprise can make today. The deployment options the application and the workloads involved should be carefully evaluated and it usually falls into the 4 following scenarios (Microsoft offered):

• Windows Server 2012 R2
• Microsoft Azure
• Cloud OS Network
• Office 365

Different workloads and applications will logically lead to certain targets. Others could offer the possibility of migration to one or more of these destinations. The choice will be driven by factors such as speed and ease of migration, cost, and desired functionality in the migrated solution.

Hybrid Cloud:

The hybrid-solution of on-premise and Cloud has two categories:

1. On-site private and community Cloud
2. Outsourced private and community Cloud

Value Proposition For Hybrid Solution:

1. More people prefer the hybrid solution