The cloud is not a destination, it’s a journey. A recent webinar sponsored by ePlus and VMware illustrates that, and offers best practices on how best to implement the hybrid cloud for your organization and to sustain it over time.

As Mark Melvin, CTO of ePlus, noted in the webinar “Your Journey to the Cloud Starts Today,” businesses are moving faster to the cloud, but with less predictability. At the same time, businesses are challenged to be nimble with their architectures. Hardware and virtualization are keys to doing that, he said. But he indicated that’s just the start.

“Hybrid is where everybody is really trying to get,” said Melvin, and that may be a combination of as-a-service options like CaaS and PaaS, and cloud-native platforms.

Indeed, most enterprises will leverage a combination of cloud architectures, continued Chris Wolf, vice president and CTO of global field and industry at VMware. That’s fine, he indicated, but in the process they don’t want to completely silo those operations. Instead, businesses want to be able to see availability and other parameters across the different clouds they leverage.

Hybrid cloud implementations are attractive to many enterprises because different cloud options offer different benefits (and limitations), Wolf points out. For example, provider-native platform services are speedy, but also sticky. Meanwhile, PaaS and CaaS offer application agility, but limited operational agility.

That said, if organizations combine globally consistent infrastructure-as-code with some of the above options, they get portability of Docker containers, and portability and consistency of operational layers as well – including monitoring, security, troubleshooting, and more. VMware helps enable that consistency, he said, so enterprises can deploy applications anywhere and have consistent management, and even protect their intellectual property.

Many suppliers say they provide cloud management via a single pane of glass, he added, but that’s not the fact. And, he said, centralizing everything is not the solution given that service providers are innovating at a rapid pace, so centralizing everything could impede agility. Instead, he said, businesses should consider centralizing certain aspects of their cloud-based environments while taking a distributed approach to others.

Wolf suggests that businesses implement a centralized dashboard to monitor and manage all of their cloud services; understand the cost of operations for each; set and see policy and security; have federated identity and access management; do workload migration; enable discovery; and log analytics. A distributed approach, he added, is a better approach for provider-centric platform integrations, third-party SaaS (News - Alert)/management integrations, provider-centric orchestration, and developer tooling and integration.

To listen to the entire webinar, click here.