Advantages of Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Cloud has taken a center stage in most of the enterprise IT strategies. Over the last decade, cloud computing has witnessed colossal growth. Revenue within the global cloud market has been predicted to rise to USD $390 billion this year, which is a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17% from USD $180 billion in 2015. Today cloud is essential to every organization big or small. There is a clear move away from traditional infrastructure to embrace the benefits that cloud computing. 

Public and private cloud are the two primary cloud models available. The public cloud offers cost savings and increased flexibility but uncertain security, whereas the private cloud offers high security and assured data control but at a substantially higher cost. 

The hybrid approach allows applications and components to interoperate across boundaries (for example, private cloud versus public clouds), between cloud instances. This approach keeps the same level of distribution and access flexibility is also needed for data. Whether you’re handling high computing workloads or BigData, in the dynamic digital world, you should plan for things to move around in response to evolving needs. Where applications or data live today might not be the best place for them to live over time.

Read More: Choosing the Right Hybrid IT Infrastructure Mix for Your Applications

In this article, we will cover the six major advantages enterprises could benefit from if organizations implemented a hybrid cloud solution.

Flexible Architecture Design

A hybrid cloud allows customers to run their workloads where it is most efficient. The requirements of the organizations are every changing, thus having a hybrid cloud will make the infrastructure demands of their business more efficient. They can customize their architecture to ensure the fulfillment of high-performance requirements through the correct hybrid cloud strategy. 

In a hybrid cloud, the enterprise will build its foundational infrastructure (primary private cloud) while for short-term spikes or unknown demands, an enterprise can opt for the public cloud, ensuring that IT budgets are more flexible and costs are controlled. Hybrid cloud by nature is flexible in its architecture design, also makes it easier to integrate legacy infrastructure, as organizations can customize their deployment to best suit their existing setup.

This way organizations can meet financial IT targets. IDC estimates that organizations can save up to 24% on their IT costs by deploying a hybrid cloud. 

Enhanced Security and Compliance

One of the main concerns for a lot of enterprises is the fact the public cloud is multi-tenancy (infrastructure serving multiple customers), which may not be compliant with organizations’ policies. A hybrid cloud model mitigates this so that an enterprise can ensure all their compliance are met. Having a private cloud the infrastructure will be having private networks that can be used by the VM’s to transfer data to each other and sync data across multiple servers. 

Doing away with multi-tenancy and opting for dedicated infrastructure for their critical applications also helps businesses stay in-line with regulatory and compliance guidelines for their region.

Encouraging Innovation

Hybrid cloud has given developers the flexibility to test new applications, products, and services. Having a hybrid cloud will enable fast-paced resource provisioning and de-provisioning, this takes away the time and cost restrictions associated with scaling in-house IT Infrastructure.

Hybrid Cloud makes it simple to perform pilot projects, Proof of Concepts, and software trials. If the testing yields a successful outcome, the organization can continue production. If the testing is deemed unsuccessful, cloud resources can be de-provisioned and developers can move on to testing the next idea.

The fact that testing can occur without any significant upfront capital expenditure removes cost barriers to innovation.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business continuity is an organization’s ability to ensure operations and core business functions are not severely impacted by a disaster or unplanned incident that takes critical systems offline. Business continuity planning is the interdepartmental process, often led by information technology, of implementing the tactics used to restore normal business in a set amount of time, define the amount of data loss acceptable to the business, and communicate critical information to organizational stakeholders during and following incidents.

It is not just about backing up and replicating data on the cloud. An ideal business continuity solution ensures data availability seconds after a disaster. Hybrid cloud solutions are a key part of any business continuity solution as they enable the replication of mission-critical data to cloud infrastructure present in different locations to the primary infrastructure. This provides data insurance when disaster strikes, minimizing downtime and revenue loss from disruption of business operations.

Agility Through Scalability

Scalability in the context of cloud computing can be defined as the ability to handle growing or shrinking resources to meet business needs. Traditional methods of scaling IT infrastructure are complicated, expensive, and inefficient. When it comes to traditional IT or even private clouds an enterprise will need to determine their exact resource needs and bear the expense of owning and maintaining new infrastructure. 

A hybrid cloud is a solution, it gives an enterprise a choice in what they migrate to the private cloud vs public clouds thus reducing overall capital investment. Implementation is more convenient with the use of automation rules on the cloud for resource scaling. This facilitates demand-driven usage and optimizes the underlying infrastructure for efficient performance.

Improved Time to Market   

In today’s digital age, disruption is normal. Businesses are required to change business models overnight to keep apace with the latest trends. Time to market is crucial for the prosperity of almost all enterprises. The reduced deployment time offered by a hybrid cloud solution enables businesses to respond faster to changing requirements without losing their competitive edge. Companies can test, prototype, and launch new offerings under very tight deadlines. Such adaptability is not practical on traditional IT infrastructure.

Reduced Size of Customer Managed Data Centers

There was a time when the bigger your data center was, the better – mostly because almost all infrastructure and applications were managed on-site. Adaptation of a hybrid cloud is a way to accommodate changing business conditions that required different delivery models, depending on expected outcomes.

This helps the enterprise to reduce its capital expenditure and manage costs. For instance, the Hybrid Cloud model will have the ability to adjust spending limits based on project and/or capacity usage. The whole idea with having a hybrid cloud is that costs were to be generally predictable from one fiscal period to another. As well as taking care of unexpected IT short term IT demands which IT managers no longer have to increase the capacity of their data centers. 

Conclusion 

That’s all largely changing now because many businesses have migrated applications and services to hybrid cloud models. Off-loading some applications can be cost-effective because there is no one-size-fits-all solution and some applications are best delivered off-site due to better security and compliance suitability.

TDWS Hybrid Cloud Solutions assists the enterprise to manage challenges associated with hybrid cloud deployment. With expertise in hybrid deployments and a team of solution architects that can design solutions to meet specific requirements, users can be assured a smooth experience when deploying a hybrid cloud.