Why Should Enterprises Consider Moving to Hybrid Cloud?

In the wake of COVID-19, organizations everywhere had to reinvent their approaches to work culture, market adaptability and operational processes. The shift to remote and hybrid work environments has exposed the need for businesses to adopt IT infrastructure robust and responsive enough to keep their workforce connected and their customers engaged, no matter the context. 

For businesses seeing to maximize IT flexibility without compromising security, a hybrid cloud model offers an ideal enterprise solution. 

What is hybrid cloud? 

Hybrid cloud computing is an IT operating model that combines the best of private and public clouds to offer enterprises increased agility, flexibility, security and innovation capabilities. 

A hybrid cloud environment is a mix of on-premises IT infrastructure, private and third-party public cloud services. The private cloud can be either hosted at the business itself, by the cloud provider or by a third-party service provider. Cloud providers do not offer hybrid cloud solutions; enterprises must build the solution on their own or collaborate with a service provider. A hybrid cloud is also considered multi-cloud when it uses cloud platforms from multiple providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. 

This model empowers enterprises to select the ideal IT infrastructure for each business application. It offers greater flexibility to move workloads between private and public clouds based on computing requirements and costs implications, and offers more data deployment options. According to the third annual Enterprise Cloud Index research by Nutanix, 86% of respondents considered hybrid cloud computig to be their ideal operating model.  

Hybrid cloud computing has also experienced higher growth compared to other deployment models. According to Mordor Intelligence, the value of the hybrid cloud market is expected to reach $145 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 18% between 2021 and 2026. 

What are the factors driving hybrid cloud adoption? 

Organizations considering a shift in their IT infrastructure should consider a few key factors that set hybrid cloud solutions apart from other models. 

Scalability 

The hybrid cloud model augments enterprise capabilities to provision, deploy and scale resources based on the demand pattern and criticality of the data. The public cloud offers access to scale and capacity when demand exceeds enterprise local data center capacities. Enterprises can use an easily scalable public cloud for their dynamic workload. If an application has  fluctuating demand or dynamic usage patterns, it is best suited for public cloud services. Stable workload and critical application data, which is becoming increasingly important, can be allocated to a private cloud or on-premises data center. 

Agility  

Cloud agility is the rapid provisioning of computing resources that enables enterprises to reduce the time required to develop, test and launch applications. A hybrid cloud approach helps enterprises combine on-premises resources and private and public clouds to match application development and data management requirements. This enables enterprises to not only quickly provision, but also access best-in-class computing resources cost-effectively. 

The infrastructure agility offered by the hybrid cloud helps accelerate the pace of innovation, an important competitive advantage for businesses seeking to improve existing products and services and introduce new ones to capture emerging customer needs. 

Cost Optimization 

One of the advantages of cloud computing is its cost-saving potential, with the change in the financial model from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. The hybrid cloud model offers additional cost saving opportunities. 

A study by IDC found enterprises incur 57% lower costs from migrating workloads to a hybrid cloud environment compared to another public cloud. The average annual benefit of running a hybrid cloud environment came to $895,400 per 100 virtual machines.

Nonetheless, if computing resources are not managed properly, costs may spin out of control. A hybrid cloud with cloud computing environments from different providers needs proper oversight to derive the intended cost advantages. In a multi-cloud environment, over-provisioning is one of the challenges in achieving the desired cost benefits. 

In this context, it’s critical for businesses to establish FinOps (cloud financial operations) teams whose objective is to increase the business value of the cloud for the enterprise. The FinOps team helps enterprise cloud users identify over-provisioning or inefficient use of resources by providing visibility to cost and real-time usage data. Access to data helps users to efficiently plan cloud usage and avoid over-provisioning, thereby enabling enterprises to optimize costs. 

Security and Compliance  

Security and policy compliance are also important factors influencing enterprise cloud strategy. In the third annual Enterprise Cloud Index research by Nutanix, security and compliance were the top-ranked factors affecting enterprise decisions about their IT infrastructure models.

With applications and data constantly moving across private and public clouds, it can be challenging for enterprises to maintain compliance with corporate data governance and security policies. In some industries, like financial services, regulations require customer data to reside within the enterprise’s infrastructure, which makes public cloud services unfeasible. Hybrid clouds help mitigate these risks with the option of using a private cloud to store sensitive data, even as enterprises use public cloud to run other enterprise applications. 

If implemented properly, a hybrid cloud model will help augment enterprise IT security. Enterprises need to have visibility into the multiple cloud platforms and distributed systems that make up their IT infrastructure. Even as public cloud providers offer best-in-class security and compliance solutions, it’s critical that businesses understand their data backup, encryption and protection processes. 

Flexibility  

In a fast-changing digital world, business needs are constantly evolving. A hybrid cloud model helps enterprises address the challenge of demand uncertainties, allowing them to easily scale up or down their IT infrastructure for any sudden demand spike that may not have been factored in during the planning stage. A hybrid cloud also enables enterprises to move applications and data sets across public and private clouds for security, confidentiality and cost optimization purposes. 

The hybrid cloud gives enterprises flexibility to manage fluctuating technology and business demands in an uncertain world. 

Disaster Recovery 

Disaster recovery solutions without the cloud are an expensive proposition for any business, requiring backup sites and applications to be owned or rented by the organization. Cloud computing offers an economical and flexible solution for disaster recovery, with the hybrid cloud adding another advantage. 

The public cloud can be used for less critical resources, such as backup database storage, while the private cloud can be utilized for critical and sensitive resources. Businesses can also leverage the public cloud to manage geographical risks better. Ultimately, you get the best of both worlds at a significantly lower cost, compared to hosting and managing a disaster recovery site on your own. 

What are the challenges to a successful hybrid cloud implementation? 

Among the technology challenges for a hybrid cloud implementation are migration, security and compliance and governance. A hybrid cloud consisting of multiple platforms requires a diverse set of skills, and management tools to effectively manage the cloud environment. 

According to IDC research, enterprises have mentioned skill set limitations as the primary roadblock to a successful hybrid implementation. The lack of availability of off-the-shelf products and services has emerged as the second limiting factor in enterprise implementation of hybrid cloud operating models. 

Drive business transformation and innovation with a hybrid cloud solution 

With advantages in security, cost effectiveness, flexibility and scalability, the hybrid cloud model helps enterprises build the right infrastructure foundation for an agile and innovative business. It maximizes cost savings and productivity, even as it drives business transformation. 

Material’s cloud specialists can help you create the right hybrid cloud operating model tailored to your unique business needs. Our customized cloud transition approach, combined with our technical expertise, can augment your internal capabilities and help you implement and manage the hybrid cloud model smoothly and securely.

Get in touch to set up an expert consultation.