Hybrid Cloud Operations
Best practices for flexibility without the complexity
Become a TBM Council Member and contribute to thought-leadership and standards for hybrid cloud operations
The emergence of multi-cloud environments
Hybrid cloud strategies guarantee today’s organizations can preserve the broadest range of flexibility and options for performance, resilience, and security while providing the crucial platforms to support emerging technology like artificial intelligence (AI), achieving sustainability and environment, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives, and delivering new levels of business value. Operating in hybrid cloud environments, however, introduces increased complexity that can undermine the benefits of these strategies while introducing new risks, all of which must be planned for.
As cloud continues to envelop more and more of the technology supply chains used to develop and deliver digital products, it reflects an increasingly outsized impact on value creation. It is also the most volatile cost driver for technology spend. In order to support hybrid operations, the TBM Council maintains an evolving set of practices, recommendations, and standards integrations to help organizations optimize the value of digital products and realize the benefits of hybrid cloud by tackling the complexities of hybrid operations.
Hybrid is the way
The options available to organizations for leveraging cloud continue to increase, offering technology teams a complex array of new and evolving services specialized for AI, machine learning, application development, and more special-purpose use cases. These can be deployed and managed across a mix of traditional IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS service types, all managed in different cloud environments:
On-premises clouds
Ideal for sensitive workloads, regulatory compliance, and mission-critical applications with precise performance requirements
Public clouds
The go-to solution for rapid provisioning, scalability, streamlined governance, offering an increasing range of services ideal for most data and workloads
Edge computing
Optimizes bandwidth utilization and provides low latency and real-time processing necessary for decision-making enabled by digitized business operations
Sovereign cloud
Addresses data compliance laws by hosting and reserving select data and workloads to environments within specific country or regional boundaries
Community cloud
Shares resources across multiple collaborative organizations with common goals and interests
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are the norm
Organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid multi-cloud strategies, leveraging a mix of on-premises and multiple public vendors to take advantage of the full range of environments, services, and options. Hybrid operations refer to the day-to-day activities and decision-making that take place within these environments, which create numerous benefits for organizations while also creating challenges in operational complexity.
Benefits and challenges of hybrid cloud
Benefits
Challenges
Strategic flexibility
Deployment flexibility
Hybrid cloud strategies provide product teams with a wide range of deployment options to maximize multiple dimensions of value, including performance, customer experience, risk, and cost-effectiveness.
Cost optimization
Hybrid cloud ensures product teams can deploy to the most cost-effective region and vendor, continuously rightsize storage and workloads to optimize run-the-business costs, and, at an organizational level, negotiate rates while avoiding vendor lock-in.
Risk mitigation
Hybrid cloud strategies can more readily accommodate regulatory requirements for data storage and compute workload, minimize performance and security risks, and future-proof products.
TBM maximizes value from hybrid operations & minimizes complexity challenges
To support hybrid operations, the TBM Council has prioritized developing best practices for intelligent adoption, integration with the FinOps framework, and guidance for managing expanded dimensions of value such as cybersecurity, risk management, sustainability, and ESG within cloud environments.
These and other practices for TBM for cloud, including tagging strategies and unit economics best practices, are developed and maintained by the TBM for Cloud Strategy Community.
TBM for intelligent adoption
Initially driven by early, aggressive cloud adoption initiatives, many teams continue to repeat the mistake of assuming value will always be derived from the cloud. Popular “lift and shift” and similar initiatives often targeted achieving a high target percentage of cloud adoption within an advanced timeline, typically highlighting the shifting of costs from CapEx to OpEx as a primary driver. In practice, most cloud adoptions failed to realize cost savings and, in many cases, negatively impacted customer experience, risk, or other elements of value.
Today, most organizations’ cloud strategy and technology stack should be hybrid by design. Cloud deployments should not fall into a given environment by chance or focus on a single dimension of value. Instead, deployments should consider baselines and targets across a multi-faceted set of value drivers – such as costs, performance, and risk – and then evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each cloud environment for facilitating the desired value outcomes of the deployment.
TBM practices for intelligent adoption guide product teams in developing value indexes for cloud adoption, including baselines and targets for multiple value dimensions such as hosting costs, performance, risk, and customer experience. Teams leverage these indexes to compare possible deployment environments and select the deployment scenario that supports the highest possible value.
TBM & FinOps integration
While TBM provides an overarching discipline and supporting processes and practices for technology investment planning and value management across the organization, FinOps provides a framework purpose-built for managing the day-to-day financial aspects of cloud operations in real-time. By integrating TBM and FinOps practices, organizations can unlock numerous capabilities for optimizing costs and value end-to-end for today’s digital products:
Full-stack product & service TCO
Product managers can combine the costs of DevOps and CI/CD development chains and cloud utilization for delivery alongside labor costs, licensing, vendor fees, and other non-cloud costs to understand and manage fully realized product total cost of ownership (TCO) models.
Operationalizing financial governance & budgetary accountability
TBM gives organizations a framework for planning their strategic investments, managing portfolios and resources, forecasting spend, and allocating budgets, while FinOps allows teams to monitor budgets in real-time, alert on expense overruns, and enforce accountability for cloud spend on a day-to-day basis.
Unit economics & product profitability
FinOps provides highly granular costing data that can be combined with visibility to spend drivers and TCO afforded by TBM to identify inefficiencies in unit costs, while TBM can also connect P&L data leveraged to understand and optimize broader product pricing profitability.
Demand planning & rightsizing
TBM helps organizations aggregate strategic initiatives, demand forecasts, backlogs, and catalog demand history into a prioritized set of demand requirements that can be shaped at the portfolio, product, and functional levels while FinOps allows teams to reactively scale operations and rightsize workloads.
Predictive cost modeling & scenario planning
TBM and FinOps each provide a range of historical data ranging from workload and storage fees to product and portfolio budgetary trends that can be combined to develop highly granular forecasts and even leveraged to develop and analyze migration and expansion scenarios.
TBM-Cloud Primer
Discover how leading enterprises use Technology Business Management (TBM) to manage the impact of public cloud consumption on applications, products, and services. This complimentary course is designed for senior technology and finance leaders who need to learn how public cloud adoption impacts the cost of delivering solutions.
TBM for hybrid cloud operations unlocks multi-dimensional value
While intelligent adoption strategies and FinOps integration are key pillars of TBM’s support for hybrid operations, today’s organizations are increasingly required to manage multiple dimensions of value. The combination of hybrid operations and the TBM discipline allows teams to understand the impacts to each dimension of value, make fact-based tradeoff decisions, and deploy and operate cloud workloads over time while delivering the highest value possible.
AI acceleration
Leverage TBM to understand fully loaded investment models and TCO for AI initiatives and compare use-case costs and viability.
Sustainability and ESG
Combine hybrid cloud and TBM to select deployments and operations in environments with the least intensive carbon footprints.
Business agility
Redeploy products and services between environments while understanding long-term cost and value implications.
Organizational alignment
Align decision-making across decentralized teams to common business objectives and priorities.
Demand rightsizing
Continuously scale workloads to optimize costs.
Customer experience
Leverage an environment that supports the target customer experience while understanding the cost tradeoffs.
TBM Partners Help Minimize the Complexity of Hybrid Operations
Join the TBM community: where innovators and leaders converge
The path to mastering hybrid multi-cloud adoption is an ongoing adventure, filled with learning, growth, and community collaboration. That’s why we invite you to delve deeper into the world of TBM and cloud management. The TBM Council is your gateway to a treasure trove of knowledge: think cutting-edge research papers, insightful case studies, and vibrant community forums where you can exchange ideas, tackle challenges, and celebrate successes with fellow practitioners.
We’re calling on organizations and forward-thinking individuals to dive into the TBM community. Participate in our events, engage in our discussions, and tap into a vast reservoir of knowledge. This isn’t just about networking; it’s about contributing to and benefiting from the collective wisdom in navigating the dynamic world of cloud computing.
