Many organizations are now taking major steps towards cloud computing, as maintaining their own capital-intensive IT infrastructure is a complex process. Companies are shifting to acquiring technology as and when they need it, paying only for the resources they consume.

Companies all over the world are facing budgetary pressures to develop business strategies that reduce time to market, increase savings and strengthen regulatory compliance. Organizations want to accelerate the pace of change, but traditional IT environments can’t match that in modern enterprises, as it often fails to satisfy current needs and market demands. Inability to address time, budget and compliance-related challenges significantly weaken an organization’s industry position and slows down its growth.

Both public and private cloud have advantages and disadvantages, which can create hurdles to adoption. Some of them are:

• Challenges in securely integrating public cloud and on-premise application workloads
• Security and privacy concerns associated with public cloud deployments including security in the cloud
• Compliance demands related to local data regulations, which may require data to reside locally in-country
• The initial private cloud capital expenditure

There’s no single solution to these issues and instead, CIOs agree that organizations will increasingly adopt a hybrid approach – combining the most appropriate mix of private and public cloud services that best meets their needs.

A hybrid cloud offering helps companies gain a competitive edge by:

• Speeding time to market
• Ensuring compliance
• Maintaining customer control
• Giving you complete control over law-regulated data
• Helping avoid vendor lock-in
• Offering AI-powered performance management

Planning your journey

Organizations should essentially view their move to the cloud as a journey. It’s about classifying the enterprise workloads – and determining which workloads can effectively be transitioned, managed and provisioned to users over time, exploiting the most appropriate service delivery model.

Enterprises are proactively considering which infrastructure types are best for their individual workloads and what their optimized overall profile of infrastructure types looks like. They actively choose from traditional IT infrastructure and a diverse set of cloud options, matching infrastructures to use cases and development requirements in the way they feel makes the most sense.

IDC’s recent survey of IT leaders across the globe shows that leaders have arrived at a very balanced approach to compute infrastructure for business‑critical workloads. Their use of computing architectures is evenly distributed between traditional IT, private cloud, public cloud and SaaS. In contrast, less mature enterprises continue to rely on traditional IT to a much greater degree, with laggards still processing 65% of workloads on traditional on‑premises infrastructure.

Understanding the business environment and what is core to your value chain will help to determine where your workloads need to exist to maintain the competitive advantage. What’s more, you need to plan your journey:

• Risk profile: What types of services are close to the organization’s core?
• Functional requirements: QoS, security, and latency.
• Non-functional requirements: Regulatory framework and privacy needs.
• Workload classification: What types of service are to be offered and how does it map to different cloud offerings, e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or BPaaS?
• Investment lifecycle: Where is the organization in its investment lifecycle – for instance, if it needs an asset refresh or not.
• Roles and responsibilities: What’s the impact on each BU, function and resource?
• Dependencies: What dependencies are there on other services/applications/assets – is there a need for change or transition?
• Transformational: What are the requirements, costs and complexity to transform current technologies in relation to the forecasted lifecycle?

Work with FIS Global Commercial Services

Our hybrid cloud solution

Our hybrid cloud offering is a comprehensive solution – meeting the demands of organizations wanting to deploy and easily expand their solutions across verticals. Significantly, it can be on-premise or on public cloud, with the default configuration set to ensure that the vital data can stay resident in-country, meeting regulations and data sovereignty needs. Our depth and breadth of experience in enterprise service delivery – coupled with our proven track record in cloud and unique partnerships – means we’re well placed to de-risk our customers’ investment and fast-track their journey to the cloud.

FIS’ hybrid cloud solution allows our customers to reap the benefits of rapid deployment and ROI, without the hassle and resource constraints associated with self-management. Things like Cloud burst, reducing Data Center footprint, Disaster Recovery, DevOps and upgrades are within the user’s control and are seamless. FIS Hybrid Cloud solution helps our customers in achieving:

• Validated design architectures and blueprints for their Cloud deployments
• A holistic hybrid cloud model which takes into account process needs, people and technology
• Faster deployment time
• A modular, scalable deployment model that can offer best of both the worlds i.e. public & private
• Reduction in infrastructure total cost of ownership when compared to existing legacy solutions