Odds are you didn’t turn out the lights in your data center when you hit the “on” switch for your cloud. You’ve still got on premises resources, along with your cloud resources, meaning you’ve got the challenges of managing a hybrid IT environment. The biggest challenges include:

Security

Both cloud and on premises infrastructure can be secure, but you may need to work harder to make a hybrid environment secure. That’s because, for all the talk of blurring the perimeter, hybrid effectively gives you multiple perimeters. In addition, because the two environments aren’t entirely separate (see “integration” next!), there are intersection points that can allow threats to travel between the cloud and on premises environments.

Integration

If you designed your cloud and on premises environments to operate in isolation, you can’t get the most benefit from either of them. No matter how many environments your IT lives in, it’s still supporting your one business. You need to ensure that applications can easily communicate and that data can easily be accessed by applications no matter where the data or application is located.

The middleware that connects systems is extremely important and you need to make sure it’s both efficient and secure. In addition, you may need to upgrade legacy systems to enable them to interoperate with newer systems in the cloud.

You may also want to review your workflows, particularly those that require integrating cloud applications with legacy applications in the data center, to determine where they can be simplified.

Data

Data is the key driver for business today. No doubt applications and hardware are important, but they exist to create data, process data, and derive insights from data. It is more important than ever to ensure that data is accurate and accessible.

This isn’t just about security and data protection, but also about the data models you create. Migrating to cloud provides a great opportunity to review your data models and check whether they’re consistent across your business and whether you need to update them to better reflect how you operate.

Users

All of this technology is meaningless unless it’s delivering value to users. That means ensuring that users are able to easily access their applications and resources wherever they reside, that they get adequate performance, and that they’re protected from malware and other threats. This requires taking a look at your systems from the user’s point of view, not just technology, and making sure all the complexity remains behind the scenes and doesn’t impact how users interact with any of the technology.

Get help tackling these hybrid IT challenges from Prescient Solutions. Contact us to learn how our IT consulting and managed services help businesses in Chicago and Schaumburg effectively operate resources in both cloud and on-premises data centers.