The 2018 State of the Cloud Survey revealed these facts
- 96% of respondents use the cloud
- 81% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy
- 92% of respondents have adopted public cloud
- 75% of respondents have adopted private cloud
- 45% of enterprises classify hybrid cloud as their top priority
Bearing in mind the last statistic, there are some good reasons for your business to go hybrid. Remember that hybrid cloud is not really different from public or private cloud. Essentially, it is a mix of both in which an orchestration layer enables you to shuffle data from one cloud platform to the other.
With hybrid cloud, you get the best of both worlds. A scalable and fully redundant disaster-recovery platform combined with the control and compliance associated with the private cloud. Moving your workloads between private and public cloud gives you the flexibility you need to keep pace in this frenzied business world.
What are some of the main uses and benefits of hybrid cloud for your business? Let’s take a look at a handful here.
Minimize CAPEX
In today’s challenging financial times, you can be confronted with a conundrum. Your IT budget is constrained while you face an increasing demand for new services. If your on-site private cloud doesn’t have the capability to cope with these demands, this is when a hybrid cloud solution comes into play. Simply put, you can rent additional capacity from a public cloud provider instead of a big CAPEX investment on the expansion of your physical data centre.
Keep Your Valuables Private
While the public cloud may be cost-effective, some view it with scepticism when it comes to storing sensitive data, IP and applications. This is where hybrid cloud is a winner. You keep control of your critical workloads and host less critical resources on a public cloud. You have the option to relegate each type of data or application to the most appropriate cloud platform.
Big Data
Think about the enormous quantity of data you accumulate on a daily basis. This wealth of data includes emails, customer transactions, website traffic, social media and in-house files. Instead of increasing the capacity of your on-premises private cloud, go hybrid. Using the public cloud means that you can scale much easier to handle tasks that require distributed computing. For example, your website traffic data can be stored locally. The analytics of all this goes to a public cloud.
Be Flexible
Unless you have a crystal ball, you don’t know how much your business needs will change in the next month, let alone year. Using hybrid cloud gives you the flexibility to match your data needs best with either public cloud, private cloud or a blend of the two. Also, with hybrid cloud you can allocate public cloud resources for short-term projects, this costing so much less than were you to use your own data centre’s IT infrastructure.
One Step at a Time
You don’t need to jump headlong into hybrid cloud computing. Take it one step at a time. In fact, you can gradually move your whole IT infrastructure to the cloud at your own pace. Start by putting some of your workloads on a public or private cloud. See how that works out. If all is good, then continue expanding your cloud presence. Again, you can access the public cloud, private cloud or a mix of the two.
