Today’s organizations must be nimble, agile and adaptable to future changes and organizational needs. One way to rethink enterprise operations, achieve cost savings and improve efficiency is to implement a hybrid cloud environment. Whether you’re looking to move your infrastructure, disaster recovery, software or other applications and platforms to the cloud, a hybrid solution is a good option.
But every organization is different. Depending on your objectives and current setup, you might want to move just a few functions to the cloud, or migrate a majority of the data from your network. That’s why, to reap the most benefits from a hybrid cloud implementation, you need to work with the right partner to assess and design an optimal plan.
When moving to a hybrid cloud, here are five questions to ask before you get started:
1.Are there any regulatory restrictions around data availability and privacy?
2.Are there security protocols I must follow for my organization?
3.Am I using applications and software such as AI, machine learning or natural speech recognition that make more sense to run in a cloud-based setting?
4.Where is my organization at with virtualization?
5.How much are we comfortable changing at one time — i.e. extending the data centre, revising the internet point of presence?
Regardless of which workloads remain on-premise and which move to the cloud, benefits of the hybrid cloud can include cost savings, shorter data recovery times and instant scalability.
3 primary benefits of hybrid cloud
Organizations may move to a hybrid cloud for a variety of reasons, but most often they are motivated by a desire to achieve one or more of the following potential benefits:
Flexibility: When you tie private and public clouds together in a hybrid model, you can place applications in one or the other depending on specific resource requirements. For example, when workloads are in the testing phase, enterprises might opt to place these in the public cloud, where it is fast and simple to scale up resources if necessary.
However, steady-state applications might be a better fit for the private cloud, especially if on-premises infrastructure is readily available and resource needs are reasonably predictable.
On-Demand Resources: Contrary to popular belief, utilizing public cloud resources won’t necessarily reduce infrastructure expenses. Rather, the public cloud can help optimize IT spending by giving you the option of scaling up on-demand resources almost instantaneously. The on-demand processing power of the public cloud lets organizations run their day-to-day workloads in their private clouds (which may cost less over time), and spill over workloads into the public cloud during periods of peak demand.
Workload Management: Some workloads are more or less equally well-suited to private or public clouds. In these cases, organizations can make decisions about where to run them based on preference, cost, existing resources and other factors.To learn more about how a hybrid cloud model offers the best of both worlds – public and private cloud – download this whitepaper.
