How APAC organisations can embrace hybrid cloud

Workload placement

When deciding which workloads and data are to be placed in a public cloud versus a private cloud or on-premise infrastructure, organisations must balance performance, governance and cost, according to Nutanix’s Tuseth.

Public cloud provides elasticity and scalability, making it ideal for highly variable or test-and-development workloads, while also helping businesses avoid large upfront capital expenditure. By contrast, workloads involving sensitive data are better suited for private cloud or on-premise environments where sovereignty and intellectual property can be more tightly controlled.

Latency is another consideration. Applications demanding real-time responses, such as AI-driven fraud detection or autonomous systems, often run best at the edge or on-premise to minimise delay. Less time-sensitive services, such as back-office applications, can be hosted in public clouds without performance risk.

“Ultimately, most enterprises are adopting a ‘cloud-smart’ approach: placing each workload in the environment best suited to its needs. This not only balances performance, security and compliance, but also provides organisations with the flexibility to adapt as their priorities evolve,” Tuseth says.

Cost and security management

A major challenge with operating hybrid cloud environments is the exponential growth of data, which can drive up costs. “Data creates real lock-in, and as it grows and becomes harder to move, the risk of cost overruns escalates,” says Deepak Waghmare, chief technology officer for APAC, Japan and Greater China at Dell Technologies.

Organisations can rein in costs by using management and monitoring platforms, tapping automation and orchestration and analysing placement of workloads to improve cost efficiency. They should also routinely evaluate the cost-performance balance of each workload – keep predictable, steady-state workloads on a private cloud or on-premise and use a public cloud for variable or seasonal demands.

“Having the ability to move workloads and data seamlessly across different landing zones – whether on-premise, private cloud or public cloud – is a critical lever for optimising costs in hybrid environments,” Waghmare says. “This allows organisations to dynamically respond to changing business demands, migrate workloads to more cost-effective platforms as needs shift and avoid the bill shock that often accompanies unchecked data growth.”

Achieving workload mobility, however, will require a unified operating model, where organisations manage both private and public clouds through a single platform and control plane using the same tools, processes and skills. This can help IT teams reduce operational overhead, streamline management and control costs more effectively, says Tuseth.

Another lever to manage costs in a hybrid cloud environment is licence portability. By shifting portable licences between on-premises infrastructure and public cloud environments, organisations can right-size their resources, avoid stranded assets, and maintain flexibility to respond to changing workload demands.

By investing in and learning a separate hybrid cloud stack, a CIO gains independence and flexibility beyond what one provider can offer

The distributed nature of hybrid cloud can make security operations more complex and expand an organisation’s attack surface beyond traditional security perimeters. Again, having a unified operating model helps here – by harmonising security controls and processes, organisations can detect and respond to threats across environments to protect data and applications regardless of where the workloads are, says Waghmare.

More generally, HPE’s Krishnan advocates for the zero trust framework to secure hybrid cloud environments. “Never assume any user or device is trustworthy by default, and apply strict policies, encryption and continuous verification across every environment,” he says.

“Adding AI-driven monitoring strengthens this by detecting anomalies faster and helping to protect workloads wherever they reside. Equally important is operational consistency. Enterprises need tools that provide oversight across on-premise, edge and public cloud, so security policies are applied uniformly.”

Choosing a hybrid cloud platform

When evaluating hybrid cloud platforms, Tuseth advises CIOs to look for capabilities that drive innovation today and help them prepare for tomorrow’s technologies. This means enabling virtual machines and containers to run legacy and cloud-native apps side by side with consistent management across datacentres, edge locations and clouds.

HPE’s Krishnan notes that openness is also essential. Support for open-source tools and multicloud integrations will let enterprises innovate quickly and avoid being too dependent on a single supplier.

Organsations should also embrace open standards and maintain full observability of their entire stack. Ultimately, the chosen platforms must be highly interoperable with existing IT infrastructure, particularly the operating system and Kubernetes, so workloads can run seamlessly across on-premise and cloud systems.

In some cases, this can mean leveraging multiple providers, selecting different ones based on specific needs of individual teams or workloads, says Chellappan, adding: “This gives your team the ability to use the best services from multiple providers without having to rebuild or duplicate applications.”

In recent years, hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud have started developing hybrid cloud offerings such as AWS Outposts and Google Distributed Cloud. A SUSE APAC spokesperson notes that while such offerings may simplify things at the onset, they limit future options and can lead to higher long-term costs.

“In a scenario where you have a mix of multicloud providers and on-premises servers, hybrid cloud is the one sure way to gain flexibility, choice and vendor neutrality,” she says. “A hybrid approach, built on a foundation of open source, allows organisations to select the best-of-breed services from different providers for specific workloads, rather than being forced to use a potentially suboptimal service from their primary vendor.”

Chellappan adds that while hybrid cloud offerings from hyperscalers extend the public cloud experience into the datacentre, they are essentially “limited extensions” of a single provider’s ecosystem. This means the control plane, application programming interfaces, and operational tools are tightly coupled with a specific supplier.

“By investing in and learning a separate hybrid cloud stack, a CIO gains independence and flexibility beyond what one provider can offer,” he says. “Such a stack reduces the risk of vendor lock-in by allowing workloads to move more easily between on-premises systems and multiple clouds. It also provides a more neutral foundation for organisations with regulatory, latency or data sovereignty requirements that demand certain workloads remain on-premise or span different clouds.”

Skills gap and culture

HPE’s Krishnan notes that technology alone doesn’t make a hybrid cloud implementation successful. Organisations also need the right people and processes, and they don’t always have the appropriate talent or culture to navigate the technological, economic and operating model changes involved in moving to the cloud.

“Many of them still run a mix of traditional IT and cloud-native workloads, and the skill sets to manage them can be very different. Teams often struggle to bridge gaps in areas like automation, DevOps practices and data governance,” he adds.

To overcome these challenges, IT operations and development teams will need to break down organisational silos and embrace a DevOps culture, one that fosters closer collaboration, automates workflows and encourages continuous learning and knowledge sharing.

Krishnan calls for closer collaboration between IT, development, and business leaders, not just technical expertise, for hybrid cloud initiatives to succeed.

“When organisations move from a siloed, system-centric approach to a collaborative, agile operating model, they set the foundation for real transformation,” he says. “Leadership also plays a role by promoting a culture of experimentation, where teams feel empowered to innovate and learn from setbacks.”