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Contributed by Paul Ponzeka, Chief Technology Officer, Abacus Group LLC

Hybrid Cloud Solutions Meet Needs of Most Organizations

But Hybrid Comes With Challenges, Risks That Firms Must Address

The public cloud has gained rapid adoption in business for the past decade, but most firms now realize that it is not an all-encompassing solution. For smaller firms, the public cloud can be a complete solution. But for most organizations the cloud falls into the normal realm of technology, in that it can complement a business but needs to work in cohesion with the rest of the business as well as the technology stack.

This is leading to hybrid cloud adoption becoming a strategy that most organizations see as the one that is the most effective for them. It can be any combination such as multiple public clouds, or more traditionally the public cloud augmenting and adjusting the technology use at the organization to better fit the client needs. This allows the organization to pick what suits it best, and not the cloud providers, but also to institute positive change to the organization and user experience without the seismic shift that comes with a pure public cloud migration.

Established organizations may struggle with the traditional server infrastructure. While many infrastructures have been adapted to a cloud model and work well -- think email with Office 365 -- the traditional server infrastructure can be difficult and costly to adapt. Here is where organizations will be better suited by leveraging the public cloud for services that are easily moved, and leveraging their existing investments in infrastructure to run those traditional workloads.

Customers will drive whatever shifts are still to come. Organizations will want to start leveraging the same flexibility and scalability they have with the public cloud services to these traditional server infrastructures. What does that mean? They are going to start pushing software vendors to adapt to the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. If their vendor doesn't, they will seek out competitors who will.

We will start to see higher rates of churn within specific software verticals as customers use their purchasing power to impact change for these legacy applications. Some will be able to quickly impact that change if it already hasn't happened. Other larger verticals will start to feel the pressure from a cost perspective to provide SaaS style pricing and flexibility in the traditional software delivery area.  Software vendors who do not have a solid strategy in this space will feel the pressure.

All of this churn with infrastructure and software will also bring new security risks that firms will need to address. Unfortunately, there will always be security threats and breaches as bad actors seek to exploit hardware and software vulnerabilities. Firms are going to need to rethink their security posture when creating their hybrid cloud strategy.

Because clouds are Internet-based services, firms are going to have to adapt to this model. The days are gone when large firms are able to just wall off their internal users from using the internet - today's employees need the Internet for their jobs.

You can see the changes now underway. Microsoft is providing direct recommendations to firms on how to structure their network or proxy designs to help customers ensure they have a positive user experience with the cloud. Firms are going to struggle as some of these recommendations are in stark contrast to security "baselines" that infrastructure teams have been designing around for years.

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About the Author

Paul Ponzeka, Chief Technology Officer, Abacus Group LLC

Paul serves as Chief Technology Officer at Abacus Group. Paul was previously managing director of engineering at Abacus, overseeing a team of 22 engineers in the areas of R&D, systems engineering, disaster recovery and networking. Before joining Abacus in 2012, Paul was previously the head of engineering for Davidson Kempner Capital Management. Prior to Davidson Kempner, Paul was a senior engineer at Eze Castle Integration, responsible for high level VMware and SAN implementations, as well as serving as the company's senior messaging expert. Paul earned a BS in Operations Managing at the University of Scranton.