Why hybrid clouds break and what to do about it

Hybrid cloud environments often break down because each environment has its own unique provisioning process, security model, monitoring stack, and cost structure. Many hybrid strategies were created based on where infrastructure happened to reside, rather than considering each workload's specific needs such as latency, data governance, resilience, performance, and cost requirements.

Enterprises often found themselves in hybrid cloud situations rather than intentionally choosing it. Acquisitions, edge deployments through operational technology teams, and greenfield developments all contributed to the creation of a hybrid cloud that, on the surface, appears unified, but functions as separate environments. This disjointed nature makes hybrid cloud management feel broken, as each environment requires its own approach to provisioning, security, observability, troubleshooting, and cost management.

To address this issue, organizations need to adopt a workload-first approach. This involves analyzing a workload's characteristics, such as performance requirements, data sensitivity, compliance considerations, and cost implications, to determine the best environment for that workload. Whether that be public cloud infrastructure for elastic front ends, private cloud for sensitive workloads, or edge computing for tasks that cannot afford the latency of returning data to the main data center.

By taking a workload-first approach, organizations can ensure that workloads are placed in the most appropriate environment based on technical and business requirements. This leads to a more consistent operating model, with a single set of tools managing provisioning, security, observability, and cost across distributed infrastructure.

The result is an IT setup that allows workloads to be moved where they belong without the need for navigating multiple isolated management consoles. The payoff isn't just a cheaper cloud bill, although that is certainly a benefit, but rather the ability to move workloads to their optimal environments, enabling more efficient and effective hybrid cloud management.