Hybrid cloud environments, combining on-premises infrastructure with public and private clouds, are becoming the norm for enterprises today. According to Flexera‘s 2022 State of the Cloud Report, 91% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, with hybrid cloud adoption growing over 60% year-over-year.
While hybrid cloud offers simplicity, flexibility, and cost efficiencies, managing disparate environments brings significant challenges. Using multiple tools and workflows to handle hybrid resources leads to complexities that hinder agility and increase security risks.
That‘s where hybrid cloud management platforms come in — providing centralized visibility, automation, and governance across hybrid IT environments. Leading examples include:
-
VMware Cloud Foundation – Offers vRealize hybrid cloud management capabilities tightly integrated with vSphere virtualization.
-
Red Hat CloudForms– Open source platform supporting self-service provisioning, policy-based governance, and centralized monitoring across hybrid infrastructure.
-
Cisco Intersight – As-a-service hybrid cloud management focused on Cisco UCS server environments with tight Kubernetes and container integration.
-
IBM Multicloud Manager – Leverages Turbonomic hybrid management software to support consumption analytics, cost optimization and intelligent workload placement.
This complete guide examines key benefits, capabilities, and best practices around hybrid cloud management in the enterprise.
Why is Hybrid Cloud Management Important?
Hybrid cloud management software and platforms help enterprises gain control over the complexity inherent in managing infrastructure and applications distributed across on-premises data centers, private cloud fabrics and hyper-scale public clouds.
Key benefits hybrid cloud management solutions provide include:
1. Optimized Cloud Costs
Hybrid cloud management provides clear visibility into resource utilization and spending patterns across on-prem, colocation, and public cloud environments. Centralized analytics dashboards allow administrators to track historical cloud usage and run "what-if" scenarios to right-size deployments — eliminating waste and reducing ongoing costs. Platform policies can automate intelligent workload placement and instance types selections based on price-performance across environments.
27% of enterprises surveyed in ESG‘s 2021 Technology Spending report cited optimizing cloud costs as a top initiative for IT investment.
2. Improved Security
Centralized identity and access controls, data encryption standards, VPC configurations and IAM policies can be applied uniformly across hybrid environments from a single management control plane. Automated remediation reduces compliance and security risks associated with sprawl. Integrations with leading threat monitoring tools like Splunk provide additional visibility.
According to IDG‘s 2022 Security Priorities study, 76% of organizations struggle with visibility into infrastructure security defenses across cloud environments.
3. Increased Business Agility
Developers leverage self-service catalogs to quickly provision infrastructure across platforms. Blueprints, configuration management code and CI/CD integrations standardize and automate application deployments to improve release velocity. Workload orchestration seamlessly moves data between cloud data warehouses and specialized analytics engines.
4. Enhanced Hybrid Visibility
Unified dashboards offer insights into resource utilization, workload throughput, and uptime metrics across hybrid infrastructure to accelerate troubleshooting. Dependency mapping illustrates connections between cloud-hosted applications. This provides IT teams an essential "single pane of glass" view reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) for cross-platform issues.
"We assessed various approaches for gaining control over our hybrid environment. Settling on Red Hat‘s cloud management platform has increased efficiency 35% in year one. We have much better visibility and governance across cloud spending, resource allocation and security policy enforcement today."
Andy Lee, DevOps Manager, Cromwell Bank
Capabilities of Hybrid Cloud Management Platforms
Leading hybrid cloud management solutions on the market today share several common capabilities that underpin the benefits described above:
Self-Service Provisioning Engines
These web-based portals and service catalogs empower developers, data scientists, business analysts and line of business owners to deploy needed infrastructure, platforms, data services and applications across hybrid environments in a self-service manner. Custom approval workflows can be configured based on procurement policies.
Cloudforms infrastructure request catalog
Such self-service access accelerates time-to-productivity for analytics initiatives while freeing IT administrators from mundane ticket-based provisioning tasks.
Centralized Policy Management
Centrally administer access controls, resource configurations, quotas, tag policies, data standards, VM placement rules and other governance policies from a unified dashboard, applying these rules consistently across heterogeneous environments. Custom filters allow scoping policies to applications, users, business units or infrastructure platforms.
Policy setting rules within Cisco Intersight
78% of organizations struggle with policy sprawl according to OpsRamp‘s 2022 summer survey. Robust policy engines help address this.
Automated, Orchestrated Deployments
Standardize and automate traditionally manual, error-prone processes for standing up infrastructure, middleware, containerized services, big data pipelines and apps across the hybrid landscape. This is enabled leveraging task modules, runbooks and administrators use pre-built workflows or model custom processes using native flowcharting tools.
Such workflow automation improves operations efficiency over 75% according to a survey conducted by EMA.
Centralized Monitoring and Analytics
Collect health metrics on hosts, VMs and services alongside cost, performance and usage/billing data from across hybrid infrastructure. Ingest data from native and third party monitoring tools into centralized data lakes. Perform analytics application mapping, capacity forecasting, anomaly detection and cost optimization. Surface dashboards and alerts to admins.
According to Spicework‘s 2022 State of IT reporting, 68% of organizations say their top cloud initiative is consolidating monitoring and spend management across services. Robust analytics capabilities address this requirement.
Hybrid Cloud Management in the Real World
Let‘s explore a couple examples of hybrid cloud management platforms deployed successfully in production:
Optimizing Cloud Spending for a Healthcare Provider
Community Health operates 12 hospitals across the Midwest US. Infrastructure VP Chen Wu sought to optimize spending on the organization‘s hybrid cloud footprint which spanned legacy data centers, an on-premises private cloud for clinical apps and hosted SaaS clinical apps.
"We were wasting 35% on unused cloud capacity based on siloed analytics. I had no view into our resource footprint across hybrid environments."
Chen ultimately invested in IBM‘s Multicloud Management Platform. He used the spending dashboards and intelligent workload placement engine to optimize resource usage and cloud costs across their footprint by 21% annually.
Automating Security & Compliance for a Bank
First Digital Bank operates branches across North America and Europe. With disparate governance policies enforced variably by different infrastructure teams and cloud services, audits highlighted multiple areas of risk exposure beyond regional compliance mandates like GDPR.
The bank‘s Chief Risk Officer Tammy Bradley sought to centralize policy administration and progressively automate controls. She spearheaded an initiative around VMware‘s Cloud Foundation platform leveraging its vRealise cloud management module.
"In less than 9 months, we automated over 68% of our security checks and achieved consistent enforcement. Our last two audits showed zero overrides."
This also freed her overworked policy team to focus on higher value controls and exception management.
Best Practices for Implementation
Adopting a hybrid cloud management platform requires careful planning and phased execution. Here are some best practices to ensure a successful implementation while drivingadoption:
Discovery and Planning
-
Catalog infrastructure – Discover all existing data center, private cloud, colocation and public cloud resources. Map dependencies. Identify "shadow IT".
-
Assess processes – Document current infrastructure, software development and service management processes. Look for manual steps and delays.
-
Engage stakeholders – Gather hybrid management requirements from application owners, DEVOPS teams and lines of business. Address concerns early.
-
Define policies and automations – Outline access controls, configurations, quotas, data standards for initial enforcement based on assessments.
Phased Rollout
-
Start small – Prove value with a limited pilot scoped to a single application, location or administration team. Walk before running.
-
Integrate existing tools & infrastructure – Onboard hybrid resources using native connectors. Bidirectionally integrate with ticketing systems, CMDBs, code repositories etc via APIs.
-
Incentivize usage – Drive platform adoption by showcasing self-service efficiencies for DEVOPS teams and cost savings for leadership. Share successes.
-
Iterate platform capabilities – Once successful with initial use cases, progressively expand platform capabilities, supported environments and user roles.
Mature Management
-
Scale governance – Centrally administer policy changes across hybrid environments using policy management dashboard to drive compliance.
-
Enhance agility – Expand developer self services and application deployment automation using custom workflows, integrating CI/CD tools.
-
Improve visibility – Ingest metrics from more infrastructure sources and tools. Build dashboards for operations and cost management.
-
Promote collaboration – Support administrators and engineers collaborating via embedded chat or ideation features rather than siloed systems.
Evaluating Solutions
With the hybrid management market forecast to exceed $35 billion by 2028 according to IDC, there are many viable solutions for enterprises to evaluate:
On-Premises Options
- VMware vRealize Suite
- Cisco CloudCenter Suite
- Red Hat CloudForms
- Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management
Pure Play Vendors
- HyperGrid HyperCloud
- Scalr Enterprise
- DivvyCloud
- Embotics vCommander
Public Cloud Native
- AWS System Manager
- Microsoft Azure Arc + Stack
- Google Cloud Deployment Manager
When comparing alternatives focus on core enterprise requirements:
Functionality – Multi-cloud support, self-service, automation depth, monitoring visibility
Ease of Use – Learning curve, UI design, guided workflows
Interoperability – Integration breadth, API flexibility, ecosystem extensibility
Innovation Pace – Roadmap commitments, feature release velocity, version upgrade complexity
TCO value – 5 year cost + productivity gains vs investment
Key Takeaways
Here are the key insights IT leaders should internalize around hybrid cloud management:
-
Purpose-built hybrid management brings order to the complexity of operating across cloud and data center environments with centralized visibility, automation and governance.
-
Critical capabilities span self-service access, policy cohesion, orchestration depth and holistic monitoring analytics.
-
Superior design empowers infrastructure teams, security leaders and technologists while saving time and money.
As modern enterprises continue embracing hybrid cloud strategies, these platforms serve as strategic enablers – helping IT tame complexity inherent in distributed environments while providing control needed to innovate reliably, efficiently and securely over the long-term.
