Hybrid cloud environments A guide to the best applications, workloads, and strategies

Nowadays, developers at pretty much every company require quick IT response time, self-service deployments, and a good user experience. And when it comes to line of business (LoB) activities, they don’t hesitate to bypass IT if they’re not satisfied with their current options. The result is that the past several years has seen the shift of applications and workloads deployed to a hybrid cloud model, with a mix of traditional on premise, private and public cloud platforms.
Yet the integration and orchestration of workloads between these various platforms means that there are factors companies must be aware of if they are to realise the cost and efficiency benefits they’re looking for from cloud services. At first, companies ran their applications, data, and compute power on local servers on-premise. Some organisations utilised virtualisation technology for their IT infrastructures, with the intent of optimising the on-premise environment. As more companies established private cloud platforms, and developers continued looking for ways to deliver releases even more quickly, they began moving some workloads to public cloud services. There’s been a natural evolution to hybrid cloud environments and the 'tyre kicking' has stopped. Yet there are questions to consider when weighing the pros and cons of designating different workloads within hybrid clouds.