TECH TALK PAPER

BUILDING A BETTER
HYBRID CLOUD OPERATING
MODEL FOR EFFECTIVE
APPLICATION DELIVERY
By Brian M. Posey

w w w. a 1 0 n e t w o r k s . c o m
 :: TECH TALK PAPER

Industry analysts at Gartner have estimated that by 2025, more than

85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle and will not
be able to fully execute their digital strategies without the use of
cloud-native architectures and technologies. In a recent webcast,
Paul Nicholson, senior director of product marketing at A10
Networks, explained why delivering applications in a hybrid cloud
environment can be challenging, and what organizations are doing to
meet these challenges.

According to Nicholson, in 2019, just on-premises applications. “You have to

before the pandemic, a survey found that think about the challenges of managing
most companies were using two or more these applications,” he said. “For example,
public clouds, and yet only 11% does a cloud allow you to scale an
considered their cloud strategy to be application in the same way that you
highly successful. Two years later, the could when it was on-premises? Can you
company repeated the survey and found have the same security policies applied
that the number of highly successful across all of your clouds? What about any
companies increased to 26%. While the regional differences that might exist?”
number increased substantially, it is far According to Nicholson, there are four
lower than it should be. things to consider for a successful hybrid
Nicholson attributes these numbers cloud deployment. These are:
to the idea that nearly every company
had a mandate to move their 1. Leveraging hybrid cloud effectively
applications to the cloud — whether it 2. A
 utomation and continuous
made sense to do so or not. Today, integration/delivery
however, there is more of an effort to 3. H
 ybrid cloud management and
make sure that an organization’s cloud operational flexibility
strategy aligns with its business 4. Implementing security and zero trust
requirements and digital transformation
efforts. This means taking steps to Of course, a successful hybrid cloud
simplify multi-cloud environments. deployment also depends on being able
to seamlessly migrate your custom
CONSIDERATIONS WHEN applications, which can be challenging.
Cover: hasan as’ari / Shutterstock.com

MANAGING ON-PREMISES AND As Nicholson explains, “Custom

CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS applications can require custom code
Nicholson explained that one of the most which is front ending the workload. This is
important requirements for cloud sometimes a barrier for cloud adoption
application delivery is the ability to because the basic load balancers or the
effectively manage both cloud and cloud providers don’t have that scripting

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“OUR APPLICATION DELIVERY

CONTROLLERS WORK THE SAME
CONSISTENTLY...ACROSS MICROSOFT
AZURE, AWS, ETC. THEY CAN EVEN
USE CONTAINERS AS WE EXPECT
THEIR HYBRID CLOUD TO CONTAIN A
MIX OF THINGS.”
—PAUL NICHOLSON, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF
PRODUCT MARKETING, A10 NETWORKS

FROM MONITORING TO CONTROL Similarly, Nicholson estimates that

Nicholson went on to talk about the troubleshooting high response time in three
importance of having a good monitoring web server apps could take about three
solution in place so that you know hours but could be reduced to 15 minutes
everything is working properly and with an effective monitoring solution.
applications are being delivered effectively This ties into a concept called the
across your hybrid cloud environment. “cloud operating model,” which is all
Nicholson cautioned, however, that as about structuring cloud resources in a
important as it is to be able to see what is way that makes the organization operate
going on across all the clouds that you more efficiently, thereby freeing up time
use, it is even more important to be able to for IT to focus on the more difficult
centrally control those environments. problems. According to Nicholson, “It’s all
Nicholson illustrated this point by about being able to define what your
explaining that the task of configuring environment is going to look like,
five devices to block traffic from a choosing the different form factors for
specific client IP might typically require that environment, and then being able to
about 15 steps to complete, and these manage that centrally.”
tedious steps could collectively consume
about an hour of your time. With proper A DIFFERENT APPROACH
monitoring, that same task could be This is where the A10 Harmony Controller
reduced to five clicks and would only take comes into play. It was specifically
about 10 minutes to complete. designed to work in hybrid environments.

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Nicholson stated, “Our application delivery Nicholson then explained that if an

controllers work the same consistently. organization wants to “work smarter, not
Customers can choose the right appliance harder,” then it needs to adopt
for them, whether this is virtual, like automation for its hybrid cloud
VMware or Red Hat based, bare metal, or environment. More specifically,
hardware. This consistent experience organizations need to be able to push
spans across public clouds, such as policies and gather analytics across all
Microsoft Azure, AWS, etc. They can even their environments, and the A10 Harmony
use containers as we expect their hybrid Controller delivers these capabilities.
cloud to contain a mix of things.” Nicholson concluded the Tech Talk by
A10 Networks also takes a different outlining A10 Networks’ key
approach to licensing. Licenses are differentiators, which include:
portable and based on capacity, not
individual units, meaning that an • Best-in-class performance with the
organization can carve up their licensed lowest TCO
capacity and use it wherever it makes • Simple and flexible licensing
sense to do so. As an organization’s • Multitenancy and scale-out capabilities
needs change, they can make changes to • Multi-cloud ready
their infrastructure and move workloads • DevOps automation support
to other clouds without invalidating their • Harmony Controller analytics.
license in the process. • Gold standard for reliability and support.
Nicholson then shifted gears and
explained that security is an ever-present Regardless of what an organization’s
concern for every organization. hybrid cloud looks like, A10 Networks can
Traditional web application firewalls provide the management, security,
(WAFs), according to Nicholson, are analytics, and automation capabilities
prone to disruption and are expensive to needed to deliver applications optimally
manage. In contrast, the A10 Next-Gen and securely. Learn more about these A10
WAF, powered by Fastly provides layered Network Solutions:
defenses against a variety of threats. It is Hybrid Cloud Application Solutions
also designed to be easily integrated into
FlexPool Consumption Based Licensing
an organization’s infrastructure while
being easy to use with low false positives
and no learning curve.

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