Mastering Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud: Strategy & Execution

Discover why a multicloud and hybrid cloud strategy matters, driven by risk mitigation. Learn strategy components, design, and governance to plan for ad hoc or mandatory multicloud and manage costs.

Learn clear definitions of multicloud, hybrid cloud, distributed cloud, hybrid architecture, and hybrid IT, plus the role of like-for-like technology and an abstraction layer as the glue.

Identify the key cloud players—AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, Oracle, IBM—and examine multicloud abstractions with OpenShift and VMware Tanzu, plus hybrid and distributed cloud options.

Identify business needs and objectives in a multicloud and hybrid cloud strategy. Explore examples across SAS hosting, best-of-breed solutions, BCDR, global service delivery, and ecosystem partnerships.

Explore how multi-cloud and hybrid environments reshape organizational structure, skills, and teams, emphasizing platform ops that unite development and operations across multiple clouds with automation, cost optimization, governance, and APIs.

Lock-in is inevitable across on-premises, co-location, and cloud layers; focus on portability by staying at the infrastructure level with containers, VMs, and data, and plan exits.

Explore cloud adjacency, moving workloads into a co-location facility to be near cloud providers. Unlock low latency, high bandwidth, and access to a rich multi-cloud ecosystem for new architectures.

Develop a practical multicloud and hybrid cloud roadmap by establishing a clear cloud strategy, customizing evaluation criteria, choosing management tools, investing in training, and enforcing consistent security and governance.

Explore replicated, distributed, and continuous multicloud architectures to design high-availability workloads, including active-active and active-passive setups, BCDR, and inter-cloud connectivity considerations.

Match applications to cloud providers in a multicloud world using criteria such as availability, edge, hybrid, and enterprise footprint. Decide workloads based on these factors.

Explore practical multicloud and hybrid cloud use cases, including active-active databases across AWS and Azure, high-performance compute, VMware HDX, microservices, and cross-cloud configuration management.

Build a high-performing multicloud team by balancing technical skills, communication, and business acumen, guided by a talent enablement program that aligns budgets, growth assignments, and continuous learning.

Explore FinOps as an evolving cloud discipline that unites engineering, finance, and business teams to perform cost management and data-driven spending decisions across on premises, single cloud, and multi-cloud environments.

Address identity and access management across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, tackling complexity, consistency, and security, and outline a roadmap with profiles, identity federation, SSO, MFA, least privilege, and centralized governance.

Leverage infrastructure as code and automation to deploy repeatable, auditable, and immutable infrastructure across multi-cloud and on-premises environments, with best practices in version control, testing, and monitoring.

Convert IT costs from a cost center to a revenue center by optimizing cloud costs through discount models, scheduled resources, right-sizing, storage lifecycle, egress, and governance.

Conclude with multicloud and hybrid cloud strategy and execution insights. Review cloud adjacency, workload placement, distributed and continuous cloud, and practices like identity and access management and infrastructure as code.