Journey to Hybrid Cloud – A marathon, not a sprint!

As organizations endeavor to move swiftly to Hybrid Cloud, the pace at which executives want this move to happen often leads to system application owners, engineering and security teams having to play catchup.

In larger organizations technical debt, legacy applications and a true understanding of application interdependencies is often a major contributor to how quickly, or not, they can pivot to this well used term we know as Hybrid Cloud. In addition to application modernization and digital transformation strategies, risk mitigation around ageing on-premise infrastructure and the reluctance for capital expenditure is part of the reasons organizations look to move to Hybrid Cloud environments, whether it be IaaS or SaaS.

But more often than not, it’s not that simple! For example, public cloud brings a level of complexity around items like identity and access management (IAM) where making sure users have access to only those systems they should have access to, is a mammoth challenge for most, if not all organizations. Another challenge is that Azure, AWS & Google Cloud each manage access roles differently, so consuming services across multiple public cloud providers becomes most security admins worst nightmare. The other thing that people often don’t realize is when they are hosting VM instances, whoever first created the tenant or subscription or account with that cloud provider typically retains admin rights. When initially spinning everything up and standing up this environment, the server admins generally get full rights to everything. There's often this rush to ‘let's get it done because we have a timeline and we need to get it done, and there’s opportunity for mistakes with that because typically those roles will be over permissioned.

In addition to these potential security pitfalls, is the fact that so few people truly understand the Public Cloud environment. When we're talking about Public Cloud and moving to Public Cloud, it's first of all a very complicated thing because Public Cloud is new for a lot of people. It changes every week or every month and keeping up with it is quite an extensive job in and of itself, or at least it can be.

At vBridge we understand that the journey organizations embark on in order to move to cloud is one often filled with angst where staring down the double barrel of ageing on-premise infrastructure, a reluctance for capital expenditure and an appetite to move at light speed is a reality. In these instances our approach is to work with clients to try understand the roadblocks and mitigate these as much as possible through our teams collective experience, skills and toolsets. We see our platform as a safe haven for customer workloads, giving the system application owners, engineering and security teams time to refocus their skill sets on the next step of the journey rather than maintaining an ageing environment and the struggles that brings along with it.