Originally posted on Building the Converged Branch by Scott Koegler.
Cloud-based environments are hardly new to IT, but there are plenty of nuances to the technology that can cause issues for IT. As simple cloud connections evolve into more complex hybrid clouds, it becomes increasingly important to get ahead of the optimization process.
I asked Kevin McGibben, CEO of LogicMonitor, What do you consider key to managing and optimizing this environment?
McGibben explained, “We’ve recently seen a significant trend of medium and large enterprises deploying instances in the public cloud to support application testing, running backups, staging elements of a DR strategy or as a sandbox for R&D. Based on our customer experience, I’ll share two of the essential keys to hybrid data center deployment.
“First, create a strategy around the planned use and evolution of the hybrid infrastructure. This helps to manage resources in short supply, namely budget and people managing the hybrid deployment. Cloud economics include steep, and oftentimes pricey, learning curves warranting expense attention and budget planning. Organizing to assign the most cloud-knowledgeable staff saves time (and dollars) in deployment, testing and tuning.
“Second, prepare your team for long-term operational success with the right people and toolsets to manage the hybrid operations. If hybrid cloud is part of your long-term Ops strategy, then you must train (or recruit) experts to lead your cloud operations. Sure, Network Admins, SysAdmins and DBAs can adapt and develop expertise, but you’ll accelerate learning if one or more (for redundancy!) of your staff are experienced in cloud technology and cloud vendors. If you don’t have the expertise internally, then find a consultant or vendor to facilitate your ramp.
“Ensure that the teams can both communicate and easily manage the hybrid operations with the right hybrid toolsets. Managing technology deployed across remote hybrid data centers can be facilitated to limit human error with the use of automation and orchestration tools like PuppetLabs or Ansible Works. Web and cloud performance benchmarking tools like Cedexis can help define speed and user experience. Finally, an infrastructure-wide performance monitoring platform, like LogicMonitor, which was built for multi-tenancy and where data can be presented in a single application and effectively used by teams to manage the hybrid infrastructure performance will contribute to hybrid operations efficiency.”