Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 54 | Page 86

FINAL WORD
Companies often misalign traditional workloads in the cloud using a ‘ lift-and-shift ’ method . And after spinning up extra cloud capacity for a specific need , it is all too easy for it to remain longer than required , incurring unnecessary costs .
With the emergence of Edge Computing , these potential visibility and management problems could multiply in the absence of effective management . Edge Computing should remove the disadvantages of location , shifting data and workloads to regional data centres , closer to where businesses want to use them , delivering faster , low latency responses . This enables advanced analytics , Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things ( IoT ). But companies may fear that if they add Edge to a hybrid cloud deployment it will exacerbate cost-control problems .
New tools make hybrid management easy and prepare for the Edge
Now , however , enterprises can more easily optimise their hybrid cloud environments . It helps hugely if they plan a hybrid strategy , preferably in partnership with third-party experts . An optimised cloud purchasing strategy ought to align to a cloud adoption and transformation framework . This should include the key principles of discover , plan , implement and decommission .
But organisations can also avail themselves of tools that address the complications of hybrid cloud management and are built with Edge in mind .
The hyperscale cloud providers already provide their own tools for hybrid cloud management , such as Google Anthos . This is a significant development , given their intense competition . Yet , it is questionable how truly vendor-agnostic such platforms are . And their involvement in Edge Computing is in its infancy , which limits their effectiveness .
Organisations will do better to deploy a next-generation cloud management platform that encompasses Edge , ready for what is set to be the next major infrastructure development . This will enable them to optimise their current cloud deployments and connectivity , expanding their use of IaaS , PaaS and SaaS applications .
Such tools offer a ‘ single pane of glass ’ across the entirety of a company ’ s hybrid infrastructure , enabling them to optimise costs and performance wherever their assets are . They can see their monthly expenditure , with invoices available by resource-type . These more advanced tools assess cloud workloads and provide comprehensive asset discovery , usage reporting and dependence-mapping .
The benefits are significant . Businesses obtain a consistent , all-round view of their deployments and the details of their cost , enabling them to shift and adapt workloads for maximum operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness . Each application is visible , as is realtime usage of cloud resources . Analytical capabilities give companies insight into their patterns of usage that enable them to improve efficiency on a continuing basis .
Hybrid will underpin Digital Transformation
With a single pane of glass management tool in front of them , companies take near-complete control of hybrid and Edge infrastructure on a day-to-day basis , mastering challenges and adapting to opportunities more rapidly . This gives them the resource-flexibility to achieve high levels of organisational agility . They can spin workloads up and down in relation to demand , avoiding the dangers of over-spend without risk of being under-resourced when faced with new demand . And of course , they can adopt the data-hungry , AI-powered , transformational technologies and applications made possible by Edge Computing .
With infrastructure becoming more complex by the day , every organisation must obtain maximum value from its hybrid environments . The advent of a new generation of cloud management platforms means every organisation with hybrid and Edge architecture can operate close to its configured performance limit without jeopardising the performance of its applications . The loss of control and agility that many organisations rightly fear , can instead be consigned to history . Far from using it as a staging post to the public cloud , companies can employ the hybrid approach for major Digital Transformation initiatives that yield huge gains in performance and profitability . p
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