What Why and How of Devising a Sustainable Hybrid Cloud Strategy 

Businesses today are faced with appeasing the stakeholder team, which wants the company to remain agile, the legal team, which demands airtight compliance; and the finance team, who demand sustainability in costs. Developers and business units are constantly hungry for applications that don’t slow them down. Enter a Hybrid Cloud Strategy. 

A Hybrid cloud is an operating model that allows users to tap into the scalability of public cloud services without losing control and compliance of on-premises systems. Let us delve into a detailed study, starting from the basics. 

What is a Hybrid Cloud Strategy? 

A hybrid cloud strategy combines an on-premise system with one or multiple public or private clouds to create an integrated IT environment. Businesses typically adopt a hybrid cloud to combine the benefits of the public cloud, such as flexibility and scalability, with those offered by on-premises infrastructure. This includes the security and control features as well. Most businesses transitioning to a hybrid cloud transformation must manage their legacy IT systems while also ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, supporting distributed operations, and accommodating dynamic workloads.

Why do Businesses Need a Hybrid Cloud Strategy?  

One of the most significant benefits of adopting a Hybrid Cloud strategy is that businesses can keep private data on-premises while still using the flexible and low-cost public cloud services. This ensures that resources are used efficiently, improves performance, and keeps the businesses in line with regulations. A backup is in place in the event of a disaster, allowing services to transition to the public cloud and continue running as always.

The most significant benefit is agility; businesses can utilise the public cloud to develop and test new applications, then migrate them to the private cloud for operational use. This approach accelerates the development of new ideas and their introduction to the market, without disrupting day-to-day operations. 

However, the question is no longer “should businesses switch to hybrid?” It is about devising the right Hybrid cloud strategy. Without the right strategy, businesses could end up with- 

1. Scattered data can lead to Compliance headaches. 
2. Surge in usage that leads to a spike in the costs.   
3. Improper planning of integrations, and so teams end up working in silos.  

A well-executed hybrid cloud strategy translates to a balanced workload on the right platform, for the right reason.

Getting started with a Hybrid Cloud Strategy:  

A hybrid cloud strategy requires making critical decisions on matching applications with the public cloud infrastructure and private or on-premise systems. This will remain unique to the business context, objectives and goals. With this in mind, let’s proceed with the following steps.

Assess Workloads: Reiterating the Basics 

• Evaluate all applications and workloads across your infrastructure. 

• Identify the ones that need public cloud agility versus those on-premises due to cost, compliance, or control. 

• Consider application criticality and performance demands like 24/7 availability for consumer-facing apps. 

• Involve skilled resources early for insights and validate if applications suit virtualised or high-performance environments. 

• Follow the PACE model: Performance, Agility, Compliance, Economics. Evaluate each workload against those factors to decide its best landing zone.  

Align Business Objectives and Vision 

• The cloud strategy must sync with long-term business goals and financial constraints. 

• Understand capital and operating cost impacts and usage-based cloud pricing models. 

• Decide between internal cloud management or managed services, shaping architecture complexity and provider choice. 

Plan Data Integration and Management 

• Ensure cloud providers integrate well with the current infrastructure and data flows seamlessly. 

• Focus on data interoperability across public, private, and on-premise environments. 

• Develop clear strategies for data residency, retrieval, and governance within hybrid setups. 

• Wrap legacy applications in APIs so they can interact with modern systems. 
  Disintegrate components that can run in containers to make them portable.  
  Utilise real-time pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Snowflake) to maintain data consistency across cloud and on-premises environments.  

Security and Compliance Controls 

• Establish a unified security framework covering all environments, including on-prem and cloud components. 

• Deploy zero-trust access, user roles, and continuous infrastructure monitoring. 

• Enforce data governance policies from the very start to prevent compliance failures. 

• Prepare ongoing audits, updates, and incident response plans to handle breaches swiftly. 

• Do not assume implicit trust, even inside the corporate network. Every identity and every request gets verified.  Centralise login authentication with a single identity provider.  

• Use vendor-provided blueprints or policies for HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and other frameworks. Enforce encryption always. 

• Build dashboards that track access and policy adherence across vendors. Regulators no longer care where the data lives. 

• Cloud service providers only secure the infrastructure, not for workloads, data, and identity.  

Analyse Performance and Scalability Requirements 

• Study workload demand patterns for timely scaling, paying attention to latency-sensitive applications. 

• Choose cloud solutions offering flexibility to scale in line with growth projections. 

Plan for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity 

• Schedule regular backups distributed across local and cloud storage  

• Evaluate cloud provider disaster recovery capabilities to complement your own. 

• Implement protocols to mitigate data loss and recover after outages. 

Control Costs Always  

• Treat cloud spending like a balance sheet. Forecast, monitor, and optimise continuously.  

• Data egress fees, shadow IT subscriptions, and abandoned test environments are significant expenses 

• Use tools like CloudHealth or native dashboards across all providers to get a single version of the truth 

Do a Thorough Check of Cloud Service Providers 

• Look beyond reputation to technical features, compliance records, and tailored industry support. 

• Consider migration complexity, upfront and ongoing costs, and avoid vendor lock-in risks. 

• Prefer providers using standardised tools and micro services architectures to maintain flexibility. 

Set a Realistic Adoption Timeline 

• Engage all stakeholders early to define roles and expectations. 

• Break the project into milestones like provider evaluation, pilot migration, and complete integration. 

• Conduct thorough testing and continuously audit and optimise post-implementation for sustained success. 

Kloudify: Your Partner in Seamless Hybrid Cloud Transition 

A well-devised hybrid cloud strategy presents the potential for cost savings, flexibility, and scalability. But implementing a hybrid cloud is a significant effort, and so it’s not without its challenges. Businesses can maximise the benefits of the process by approaching it by consulting an experienced cloud services provider. 

Kloudify is a certified Microsoft partner with expertise in building secure, scalable hybrid cloud strategies based on Microsoft Azure. From migration to management, we deliver seamless integration between on-premises and cloud environments. Take the first step in your hybrid cloud journey with us!