The de facto cloud strategy is hybrid. This term encapsulates pretty much every flavor of cloud strategy today and does little to give you the specifics. Whether you’re bursting from private cloud to public (you’re not) or managing two separate silos of applications on different platforms, the term fits. For all flavors and modes of hybrid cloud, management isn’t easy. You’ve got different technologies, different responsibility mapping, and potentially hundreds of miles between locations. Consider that:

  • Unified visibility is a nice idea but hard to deliver. Hybrid cloud at its peak has on-premises and public cloud workloads operating as one cohesive identity. But achieving this is near impossible, as architectures are vastly different. Your favorite on-premises tools may support some cloud capabilities, but rarely are they at parity with solutions built specifically for cloud.
  • Technical/technology debt gets in the way. While many can still migrate workloads to the public and private clouds using virtual machines (VMs), these VMs are often much larger and thus more expensive than microservices that can take their place. It also takes effort, money, and time to modernize and refactor.
  • Root-cause analysis and shared responsibility are like oil and water. The distributed nature of today’s applications makes failures much harder to trace and analyze. The explosion in monitoring data just adds to the issues, further complicating troubleshooting efforts.

How Do We Manage This Mess?

We get a lot of questions centered around managing this crazy hybrid reality and, specifically, inquiries that are focused on the tooling that can help alleviate all this. We cover the biggest questions in our report, Answers To Your Top Hybrid Cloud Management Questions, but a few of them are:

  • Do people still use hybrid cloud management solutions? Yes and no. There’s more of a need for cloud management, but the trend is shifting away from complex hybrid cloud management suites to lighter-weight multicloud management (public cloud-focused) or cloud cost management and optimization solutions.
  • Are the hyperscalers jumping in? Another yes and no. Yes, they are providing more visibility to environments outside of their own data centers. No, they don’t do much beyond that. Azure’s cost management tool ingests AWS and GCP billing data for visibility but doesn’t optimize its competitor’s workloads. GCP provides on-premises management of VMs.

So What Do We Do?

If you want to win in cloud management, see our latest report, How To Get Cloud Management Right In An Increasingly Cloudy World. A few items to keep in mind are:

  • Organize your business for success. Do more than just adopt a hybrid cloud management solution; set up a cloud center of excellence to train users, build assets, cloud management, and security, and eventually manage ongoing cloud operations.
  • Build reusable assets. Use a tool to create template blueprints and workflow design to avoid reinventing the wheel. Choose options that help with templates written in low-code in the UI. Have a convert-to-template option.

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I invite you to reach out to me through social media if you want to provide general feedback. If you prefer more formal or private discussions, email inquiry@forrester.com to set up a meeting with me or Guannan Lu! Click Tracy at Forrester.com to follow my research and continue the discussion.