Is Hybrid cloud strategy a good strategy?

Disclaimer: Opinion is completely personal and based on my experience in the field.

I will start with AWS analogy of Cloud with electricity. You pay only for usage. That’s the most efficient business model for both suppliers and consumers, as consumers are paying only for the services used and suppliers can enjoy benefits from economies of scale.

So why hybrid cloud? The most common rational I hear is to avoid vendor lock-in.

Let me start with the manufacturing example. The reason I start with manufacturing or Factory model is, every other new IT processes/practices are derived from the learnings and wisdom of manufacturing. Imagine a two-wheeler industry has outsourced tyres. So you will find generally they will have multiple options/brands of tyres for the same motorcycle brand. There are multiple benefits. First buyer can suggest a brand of tyre as per his/her choice. And definitely benefit of flexibility in procurement and negotiations for the two-wheeler industry. No Vendor lock-in!

Imagine Two-wheeler company has 2 assembly shops. And to avoid lock-in they have 2 different electricity provider for 2 different shops. Imagine you are having multiple electricity vendors for different rooms of your house.

Point is the hybrid strategy is for the services/products which are just part of the overall solution/product and which are completely outsourced and managed by the vendor. Even the quality is managed by the vendor.

The final solution’s quality is the responsibility of the parent company which is driven by men, machines and methods. Amongst which machines and methods are managed internally and their management derives the operational efficiency.

Let’s come back to hybrid cloud strategy now. Let’s understand first why cloud? Fundamentally cloud enables to outsource non core services to the external vendor and parent company can focus on the core business model/value. Benefit of outsourcing the non-core activities is to reduce the overhead of managing them internally. Now imagine we are going for hybrid cloud, so we are adding an overhead of managing multiple clouds. Also the core knowledge which a parent company is suppose to focus on is spread across clouds, so you are adding an additional overhead of managing this overhead as well. We should have one core base infrastructure/cloud , though we can use best services from any cloud provider, again after end to end evaluation of benefits versus overheads.

One base cloud infrastructure with one base data infrastructure leading to one single source of truth is the right way to go. You can have multiple methods of developing the final solution leveraging different services, but base infrastructure has to be one.

Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach. – -