More and more businesses are turning to hybrid cloud solutions to leverage the benefits of both public and private clouds. Hybrid clouds offer the flexibility and scalability of public clouds and the security and control of private clouds.
However, getting the most out of your hybrid and multi-cloud environments necessitates the following three requirements:
- Performance
- Security
- Cost
Read on to explore best practices for meeting these requirements in hybrid cloud deployments or read the full optimization guide here: Cost Efficiency & Automation for Hybrid Cloud Environments.
1 – Optimizing Performance in Hybrid Environments
Making workload performance improvements in multi-cloud environments can be a significant challenge for businesses. Workloads can be distributed across multiple clouds, each with different performance characteristics and costs, making it difficult to achieve optimal performance and cost efficiency.
However, by using automation, businesses can simplify the process of optimizing performance in hybrid cloud environments. Here are some of the key benefits of using automation to optimize performance:
- Avoid overprovisioning and underutilization of resources, ensuring that resources are being used efficiently and cost-effectively.
- Quickly and easily scale resources up or down based on workload demands, helping businesses respond to workload requirements changes.
- Minimize manual tuning and configuration efforts needed by developers so that they can concentrate on new innovations and product features.
To automate performance optimization in hybrid cloud environments, businesses can use various tools and technologies. These may include:
- Automated scaling policies: By defining automated scaling policies, businesses can automate the process of scaling resources up or down based on workload demands. Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer native scaling policies that can be used to optimize performance and reduce costs.
- Autoscaling groups: Autoscaling groups can be used to automatically scale resources based on workload demands. Businesses can define the minimum and maximum number of resources required to support a workload and let the autoscaling group dynamically adjust resources based on demand.
- Application load balancers: Application load balancers can be used to distribute traffic across multiple instances, helping to improve performance and availability. By using automation to configure and manage load balancers, businesses can achieve better performance and reduce costs.
- Autonomous workload optimization: Solutions like Intel Granulate autonomously and continuously optimize workloads across infrastructure, platform and application layers, providing a holistic solution that requires no development efforts or code changes.
2 – Best Practices for Hybrid Cloud Security
Robust Identity and Access Management (IAM)
In hybrid cloud environments, security starts with stringent identity and access management. Organizations must implement strong authentication mechanisms, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), to ensure only authorized personnel access cloud resources. Managing identities across various cloud and on-premises environments requires consistent policies and controls. Utilizing single sign-on (SSO) and identity federation can help maintain security while providing a seamless user experience. Regular audits of access rights, along with the principle of least privilege (PoLP), where users are granted only the permissions necessary to perform their tasks, reduce the risk of insider threats and data breaches.
Data Protection and Privacy
Securing sensitive data is critical in hybrid cloud setups. Encrypting data at rest and in transit ensures that even if a breach occurs, the information remains protected. Businesses should apply classification schemes to their data to manage it effectively according to its sensitivity and regulatory requirements. Implementing data loss prevention (DLP) strategies and tools can monitor and control data movement, preventing unauthorized data handling and sharing. Furthermore, adherence to international standards like GDPR for data privacy and protection not only ensures compliance but also builds customer trust.
Continuous Monitoring and Compliance
Hybrid cloud environments are dynamic, making continuous monitoring vital for security. Deploying security information and event management (SIEM) systems allows for real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications and network hardware. Regularly scanning for vulnerabilities and having a proactive incident response plan enhances the organization’s ability to thwart and mitigate attacks. Compliance is also a key factor; ensuring that cloud deployments meet industry standards and regulations can protect an organization from legal and financial penalties. Tools that automate compliance checks and reporting can be invaluable, as they provide ongoing assurance that security controls are effective and regulatory requirements are met.
These best practices, when implemented effectively, can significantly enhance the security posture of an organization’s hybrid cloud environment, making it resilient against evolving threats while supporting business growth and digital transformation.
Reducing Costs for Hybrid Environments
Cost management in hybrid cloud deployments can be a significant challenge for businesses. Workloads can be distributed across multiple clouds, each with different pricing models and costs, making it difficult to achieve optimal cost efficiency.
However, there are methods available for businesses to simplify the cost management process in hybrid cloud environments.
- Identifying unused or underutilized resources, enabling them to eliminate waste and reduce costs.
- Exploring opportunities to use lower-cost resources, such as spot instances or reserved instances, helping to reduce overall infrastructure costs.
- Applying cost-saving measures, such as scheduling instances to run only during specific hours or automatically stopping instances that are not being used.
To automate cost management in hybrid cloud environments, businesses can use various tools and technologies.
Cost optimization tools
Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer native cost optimization tools that can be used to identify cost savings opportunities and implement cost-saving measures.
Performance optimization tools
Solutions like Intel Granulate can reduce cloud costs even further, by identifying application bottlenecks, fine-tuning runtime algorithms, and streamlining capacity management. These performance optimizations boost application throughput and reduce job completion time, resulting in up to 45% cost reduction.
Automated cost tracking
By using automated cost-tracking tools, businesses can track their cloud spending and identify areas where costs can be reduced.
Infrastructure as code
Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform and CloudFormation can be used to define infrastructure resources in code, enabling businesses to easily spin up or tear down resources as needed and avoid costly configuration errors.
3 – Balancing Performance, Security, and Cost Efficiency in Hybrid Clouds
Hybrid cloud deployments allow businesses to balance workload performance, security, and cost efficiency. However, achieving this balance can be challenging. While each of these factors is important, there are often trade-offs between them. For example, improving workload performance may require additional resources, which can increase costs. Alternatively, prioritizing security may result in lower performance, as additional security measures can increase latency and reduce the efficiency of workloads.
To achieve optimal performance and cost efficiency in hybrid cloud environments, businesses can carefully balance these factors through:
- Optimizing workload placement and resource allocation by choosing the best public or private cloud for each workload
- Using automation to dynamically manage and allocate resources based on workload demands
- Implementing security measures that minimize the impact on performance.
Intel Granulate for Hybrid Cloud Environments
Intel Granulate empowers enterprises and digital native businesses with real-time, continuous application performance optimization and capacity management for all Linux-based workloads, leading to up to 45% in reduced cloud and on-prem compute costs, with no code changes needed.
Intel Granulate’s autonomous, continuous optimization solution can be utilized via both On-Prem and SaaS deployments simultaneously. Deploying Intel Granulate’s SaaS solution offers the advantages of Time to Value and flexibility, while the On-Prem solution may be more appropriate for applications that require enhanced security and reliability.