Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Planning for Hybrid Resources to Support Growth and Change

Planning for hybrid cloud growth and change involves understanding your data, devising a strategy to deal with the growth, and choosing a provider. We discuss each step in this section.

Understanding your data

In a hybrid cloud environment, as with any environment, you need to understand your rate of data generation. In the hybrid world, of course, this data is being generated both on-premises and in the public cloud.

Devising a growth strategy

The second step is to devise a strategy to determine how you’re going to deal with this growth. As part of this strategy, you need to understand how much storage growth you want to support internally and how much you can support outside your corporate walls. You need to do an analysis that compares your investment in corporate infrastructure to a potential cloud strategy. This analysis includes the following:

What kind of applications and data you’re willing to store in the cloud versus what you want to keep on-premises: This includes data issues associated with regulatory compliance and other risk factors. Although you may be thinking only about archive and backup applications, experts advise considering other applications that may not be mission-critical. However, make sure that your provider can adhere to any regulatory or compliance issues your company has in place. You also need ...