Designing and Building a Hybrid Cloud

Chapter 3. Assessing Your Hybrid Cloud Needs

Before you can begin architecting your hybrid cloud, it is first necessary to assess your current situation and your future needs. The better you do at this, the better the eventual outcome is likely to be.

Do your best to assess the economics of all your IT operations—both on-premises and in the cloud. This will allow you to take the best advantage of public clouds and CSPs to satisfy your needs—even as those needs continue to evolve. This chapter will help you answer the following questions:

• Which public clouds and CSPs is your business using? Which should you be using?

• Which of your applications and services are best suited for the cloud? Which applications should be on-premises?

• What new business initiatives are on your priority list, and how are those likely to translate into infrastructure, application, and service needs?

• What guidelines will you use to make hybrid cloud decisions?

• What are your primary hybrid cloud goals?

If you’re reading this report, it’s likely that your company today is not the company you want to be in the future. The whole purpose of digital transformation is to better prepare your business for success in the digital era. Because IT will play a crucial role in your success (or failure), you will need to figure out how to sustain the critical aspects of your current IT operations in a way that frees up resources to empower your business teams and enables your company to deliver new digital services to ...