Authored By: Eric Quah, Country Manager, Red Hat Malaysia & Brunei
Hybrid cloud is set to become a norm for enterprises. According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2021, 27 per cent of the organisations surveyed have a hybrid cloud strategy, and 60 per cent of them are already using two or more cloud platforms. APAC leaders in the survey also said they plan to at least triple their usage to four or more clouds, which means greater awareness and sensitivity needed around how to make those implementations successful. With cloud services being a key part of Malaysia’s MyDigital blueprint and effort to draw RM70 billion in digital investments by 2030, organisations would do well to consider a mix of clouds to reap the best of both worlds (public and private).
Hybrid cloud provides a mixture of public and private cloud environments that are connected by a single management solution. With hybrid cloud, enterprises can choose the type of cloud that best suits each workload, as well as move workloads across IT environments as necessary. For instance, a retailer can host its e-commerce website on a public cloud, but process payments made on the site in a private cloud to better protect customer data and comply with regulations.
Even though hybrid cloud can help organisations to become more agile, some Malaysian organisations may hesitate to adopt it. Here are four ways to approach hybrid cloud adoption and optimise for greater results:
Hybrid cloud means greater, not less, control over your IT infrastructure
Since hybrid cloud is made up of more than one IT environment, it may be difficult for enterprises to have complete visibility of their entire IT infrastructure. This lack of visibility can make it challenging for organisations to monitor and control their environment for security and compliance.
Organisations can counter this by ensuring that the foundation of their hybrid cloud provides predictive IT analytics capabilities. By leveraging tools that provide ongoing in-depth analysis of the IT infrastructure, organisations can proactively identify vulnerabilities.
Hybrid cloud and automation means better overview of your security
Traditionally, IT security focuses on fortifying, maintaining, and policing the data centre perimeter. Today, highly connected multiple cloud environments open more doors to attackers. If you have a hybrid cloud setup, it can also be tedious and costly to manually patch or configure systems.
Leveraging automation tools can help to protect IT infrastructure. With automated patching and remediation, you can resolve critical security risks in a controlled manner, and without delays.
A stronger hybrid cloud console gives your team greater visibility over your environment
An organisation is only as secure as its weakest link. Since the hybrid cloud environment may include cloud platforms from multiple vendors, you may need to individually check with respective vendors for updates and patches.
A hybrid cloud console allows IT leaders and teams to understand the IT risks they are facing, at a glance. Such a console should offer tailored resolution steps to help IT teams quickly and confidently address risks, to avoid downtime.
Hybrid cloud can keep up with compliance requirements
Although most companies today are using cloud technology, those in highly regulated industries are still required to ensure that their distributed environments meet regulatory security baselines for compliance and auditing. Alliance Bank is one customer that we have done this with, to build a new digital banking platform.
As such, companies should look to enhance their hybrid cloud with tools that can provide centralised visibility across the entire infrastructure. Tools that automatically scan the IT environment for non-compliant configurations and remediate them can help too.
Overall, it’s about being proactive, rather than reactive
Adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure may seem daunting as it can introduce additional risks and complexities. However, organisations can overcome those challenges by taking a proactive and intelligent approach to infrastructure management. One example of a proactive approach to hybrid cloud is AmBank, who used Red Hat OpenShift to build a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for its applications. Since the new app automates some compliance processes such as credit, risk and company checks, it reduces the complexity of the onboarding process, and minimises the number of visits to physical branches. This ultimately helps improve its speed-to-market and overall business agility.
By embracing hybrid cloud, organisations can spend less time keeping the lights on. Instead, they can sustain business success with hybrid cloud by delivering innovation on a flexible and secure platform to meet business goals, and become a true leader in the digital economy.
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