By Kentaro Sekimoto, Chief Solution Architect, Cloud Native Computing Practice Area, HPE Advisory and Professional Services
In recent years, many enterprise companies have migrated from on-premises environments to the public cloud. While many companies enjoy the benefits of public cloud, some face security and privacy concerns, difficulty in cost control, poor performance, legal regulations, and difficulty with compliance.
More and more, enterprises are looking at optimizing their cloud estate to maximize performance and reliability while improving cost-effectiveness without compromising security. Due to these challenges, an increasing number of organizations have decided to migrate partially or entirely from the public cloud to an on-premises environment. In other words, the optimal solution for many companies is a hybrid cloud environment that balances public cloud and on-premises environments. The ratio of public cloud to on-premises environments varies from company to company.
How can you successfully implement cloud workload rebalancing to build an optimal hybrid cloud environment? Here are some tips.
What is cloud workload rebalancing?
Figure 1: Cloud Workload Rebalancing
Cloud workload rebalancing is the process of redistributing resources among public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments to optimize the use of cloud resources.
In recent years, some companies have moved data and workloads that were once migrated to the cloud back to on-premises. This is affected by several public cloud migration issues.
- Security and privacy concerns: Public clouds host data and applications on third-party infrastructure, which can raise security and privacy concerns. Improper settings and poor access management can lead to data leaks.
- Data migration and operational challenges: Moving from on-premises to the cloud can come with challenges such as data migration and application rebuilding. Additionally, operating and managing cloud environments requires new skills and processes, so you need to be prepared.
- Vendor lock-in: Relying on one cloud provider can make it difficult to migrate to another cloud provider in the future. Data portability and application architecture should be considered to avoid vendor lock-in.
- Cost control: While utilizing public clouds reduces initial investment, it can increase operational costs. Optimal utilization of resources and appropriate management of budgets are both required.
- Performance and availability: Because public cloud resources are shared with other tenants, performance degradation may occur due to temporary resource increases. Also consider the possibility that a failure of the cloud provider will impact availability.
- Regulatory and compliance: Certain industries and geographies may require data protection and regulatory compliance. You still need to comply with these regulations after your cloud migration.
How can cloud workload rebalancing be successful?
In general, the steps for moving back from a public cloud to an on-premises environment are like the process used when migrating from an on-premises environment to a public cloud.
The process includes the following steps:
- Assessment
- Plan
- Migration
- Test
- Operation
Figure 2: Cloud workload rebalancing steps
Of these steps, the evaluation step is the most important for successful cloud workload rebalancing. You need to analyze factors such as cost, security, data management, and performance for your current workloads to make the right decision: on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid.
Figure 3: Cloud workload rebalancing - factors for assessment
Assessment
Analyzing cloud costs is generally a good place to start the assessment.
- Utilize cost management services provided by cloud vendors (analyze monthly cost reports)
- Utilize third-party cloud FinOps tools
Figure 4: Typical assessment process
As a next step, it is important to do a cloud security assessment and accurately understand security status. Cloud security assessments should clearly define the scope, conduct risk evaluations, review security policies and procedures, manage configurations, and check access controls. Regular vulnerability scans and penetration tests are essential, along with maintaining audit logs and monitoring systems.
For example, if you are an enterprise company, compliance is very important to your business, and you will need to ensure compliance with applicable regulatory requirements and establish processes to maintain compliance. The following image is an example of a security post review for CIS v1.40 using Steampipe, an open-source tool to instantly query your cloud services.
Some of you may not have the personnel or time to conduct such an analysis. In that case, we recommend that you take advantage of these services provided by HPE:
- Platform Landing Zone Service for AWS - Cloud Security Posture Review Advisory Service. The service offers a comprehensive security assessment that accurately evaluates an organization’s cloud security posture by reviewing security configurations and best practices employed by the customer. It provides detailed recommendations and a prioritized mitigation roadmap to improve the target Public Cloud Security Posture.
- Public cloud workload rebalancing assessment and planning workshop. This service offers a workshop to guide customers in moving from public cloud to private cloud or adjusting their usage of the two to create an optimal hybrid cloud environment. The benefits include advice on optimizing public cloud resources and costs, assistance in selecting the best private or hybrid cloud solutions, and a focus on assessment and planning rather than the detailed design of the production environment.
If an on-premises or hybrid cloud environment is required based on the current analysis results, it is crucial to build an appropriate environment based on the results.
As one of the possible target environments, with HPE GreenLake services, HPE offers a service that can design, plan, and build dedicated hardware bare metal machines, virtual machines, and container-based solutions for your workloads. HPE also offers HPE Private Cloud Enterprise as a consumption-based solution.
Figure 5: Choosing the right on-premises or hybrid cloud environment
Migration
The migration steps move data, applications, and services to an on-premises target environment. This includes setting up workload data and configuration information, necessary application server settings, and network and security infrastructure settings. These tasks also require various techniques such as data replication, backup and restore, and application containerization. Data migration must be performed in a manner that minimizes downtime and ensures data integrity.
Test
After the migration is complete, you should test the target environment to ensure that all data, applications, and services are working as expected. This includes testing applications and services in a staging environment before deploying them to production, testing production functionality and performance, validating security and compliance, and conducting user acceptance testing.
Operation
Once you have tested and validated your migrated workloads, the final step is to move them into production to ensure that your data, applications, and services are working effectively and efficiently. This includes ongoing monitoring, management, configuration of support tools, regular backups, security updates, performance monitoring, training of the user and the IT staff, etc.
Thoughtfully following these steps provides an excellent foundation for rebuilding a hybrid cloud that's right for your company.
A flexible solution that can change as your company's needs change is ideal for leveraging the cloud. Additionally, it is important to build your own hybrid cloud environment. HPE GreenLake is a hybrid cloud solution delivered to data centers, colonies, and edges. HPE GreenLake also provides various consulting services related to cloud workload rebalancing.
HPE Services provides IT services that leverage the experience and information properties it has accumulated through hundreds of successful enterprise-centric cloud transformation engagements.
Kentaro started his career as a mechanical engineer in 1988 and has since worked on a variety of computer technologies, desktop/server/storage software development, private/public cloud solutions and cloud-native technologies. In recent years, he has worked on various hybrid cloud projects in Asian countries.
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