Whitepaper – Architecting Hybrid Cloud Environments

  • Article

IT is experiencing a rapid sea of change towards greater consumption of capacity and services through public cloud providers. Enterprises are increasingly feeling pressured to leverage the cost economies and flexibility of cloud-based IT strategies. For most, the reality of current on-premises investments will dictate a gradual transformation from existing on-premises datacenters to cloud-based solutions. Even in the most aggressive pivot toward cloud-based IT, enterprises will continue to leverage their existing IT infrastructure, business applications, and IT processes. Hybrid cloud models, which combine traditional on-premises IT with the consumption of cloud-based capacity (IaaS) and other cloud-based services, play a critical role in bridging from traditional IT approaches to cloud-centric IT strategies.

When carefully planned and executed, hybrid cloud models can deliver much of the best of both on-premises and cloud services. This paper focuses on understanding the different design approaches for architecting hybrid cloud environments, using technologies available from Microsoft and Microsoft Solution Partners. The Open Source community has contributed a number of useful tools that can help with management, automation, and testing in hybrid clouds. Our objective is to enable IT architects to develop the right infrastructure strategies to deliver more of the potential promised by hybrid cloud-enabled scenarios.

This goal of this paper is to help IT architects understand how to:

  • Make strong design choices between the options available to connect your on-premises environment with Azure.

  • Understand the options for integrating identity and access management systems between cloud-based services and on-premises datacenters.

  • Understand effective approaches to managing hybrid clouds, including how to take advantage of opportunities to enhance the operational management of existing on-premises systems with cloud-based capabilities.

  • Work through the design challenges that could otherwise limit your ability to fully leverage the promises of cloud-based infrastructure.

  • Understand some of the design decisions associated with shifting existing multi-tiered on-premises applications to a hybrid cloud world.

Paper can be downloaded from here.

Feedback and comments are highly encouraged.

ECG CAT Team