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How companies are benefiting from the hybrid cloud model 

Hybrid cloud is the future for many companies. Nearly 94% of businesses surveyed in NTT’s 2021 Hybrid Cloud Report said that the hybrid cloud was a core enabler for their business strategy and critical to meeting their immediate business needs.  A hybrid cloud model can combine the best of all worlds, including on-premise and private and public cloud infrastructures, enabling workloads to move between the interconnected environments. And this flexibility brings a whole host of benefits:

Enhanced scalability and control 

A hybrid cloud model is highly scalable when it comes to managing intensive workloads in competitive business environments, making it easier to provision, deploy and scale resources to meet demand spikes. When demand exceeds the capacity of the local data centre, an organisation can burst the application to public cloud to access extra scale and capacity. 

Improved business continuity 

A hybrid cloud model improves business continuity and reduces potential downtime as well as resulting costs.  

Moving to a hybrid cloud model is often a key part of a business continuity solution because it helps organisations backup key data (by replicating business-critical data to the cloud) and ensures scalability in the event of a massive spike in demand. As computing demands fluctuate, the business isn’t at risk of overburdening their private servers (which could cause slow services or downtime). The cloud will scale to absorb the demand. 

Increased agility and innovation

The ability to respond automatically to changes in demand is a key factor for innovation and competition. A hybrid cloud model helps organisations increase their speed to market by optimising IT performance and providing the agility needed to meet changing business demands.   

A hybrid cloud model allows companies to easily expand to workloads on the cloud and quickly test, prototype, and launch/build new applications. 

Cost savings

Hybrid cloud provides consistent tools and policies across the cloud, data centres, and business locations. Organisations leverage pervasive automation and intelligence to reduce the burden on IT teams in handling day-to-day operations, freeing time to work on initiatives that support digital transformation and other innovations. 

These capabilities cumulatively deliver lower cost of ownership, higher operational efficiency and faster application deployment cycles—without incremental training or fragmentation of IT infrastructure assets and operations. 

Decrease route to market/deployment times 

The shift to hybrid cloud environments is often driven by organisations who will benefit from total visibility across their entire infrastructure, enabling workload optimisation. Such consistency helps integrate public and private cloud environments, enabling a single application deployment pipeline with unified lifecycle management. 

Within cloud, there’s also the ability to automate repeatable processes that can help increase productivity (developers building applications etc), which can speed time to market. 

Things to be mindful of when adopting a hybrid cloud model 

There is no “one size fits all” when determining where a workload should reside in a hybrid cloud model. Establishing where your workload should be placed involves identifying the “as-is”, the service owners and data owners – this discovery process can sometimes be the most challenging aspect when implementing a cloud strategy. A trusted partner like Brightsolid can help guide organisations and should be able to clearly highlight and articulate the pros and cons in a manner that is right for you.  

Another consideration is how you will manage and service your workloads when they migrate to a hybrid cloud model. Existing processes and staff skillsets may need to be assessed in case there are gaps in these areas.  

Other considerations include: 

  • Compliance risks 
  • Misaligned security controls across environments 
  • Cost Control 

Regardless of your company’s progress on its digital transformation, it’s important to think about the future and how you can continue to adapt and innovate.

Results from the Cloud Impact Study found 69% of organisations want to accelerate and better utilise their cloud deployments but realise help is needed to maximise the benefits their cloud solutions provide. 

Executives moving forward need to examine their cloud solutions and digital infrastructure and what that means to their continued security, compliance, and accessibility to critical data. It is never too late to start the journey or continue striving to evolve and improve. 

Get in touch with Brightsolid who can help determine where you are on your cloud journey and your critical next steps.