Why Your Business Should Consider Hybrid Cloud

There’s no doubt that organizations are rapidly embracing the cloud, driven by benefits such as improved agility and efficiency.

Research from a recent Gartner study predicts that by 2019, “more than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.” The study considers the idea that “cloud-first, and even cloud-only is replacing the no-cloud attitude” that has dominated corporations in recent years.

Within the cloud market, hybrid cloud adoption jumped threefold in the past year, increasing from 19 percent to 57 percent of organizations surveyed, according to a report from McAfee.

With little preference shown for either public or private cloud, organizations are moving in the direction of hybrid cloud.

That’s in line with conversations we have every day with organizations in the United States, as most indicate that their three-year ­roadmap includes building a hybrid environment.

While on-premises environments will never go away completely, companies can become more agile and achieve significant cost savings by introducing a hybrid approach to delivering IT resources to key applications and ­development services.

What Businesses Should Consider Before Adopting Hybrid Cloud

Everyone throws around the term hybrid cloud, but what does it really mean? Hybrid cloud offers a combination of on-premises and off-premises (or cloud-based) IT infrastructure ­platforms. Enabling an organization to run applications on multiple platforms increases efficiency and choice, as no one platform is right for everything.

A hybrid approach allows an organization to choose the right platform for the right workload, all for the right price. That agility speeds up time to market for many organizations and improves the capabilities used by employees and customers.

That shift is, in some ways, a no-brainer in the near term; however, it is not without challenges and risks. It’s difficult for organizations that are used to a single, on-premises vendor or platform to build, manage and protect a hybrid cloud environment.

While introducing multiple platforms drives efficiency and choice, it also introduces complexity and risk for organizations that are ill-prepared to address this shift in strategy.

Given those concerns, if you are considering a hybrid cloud environment, how do you get there?

Organizations that adopt hybrid cloud can become more efficient. Lower costs, pay-as-you-go models and access to a breadth of services are just some of the positive outcomes businesses can achieve. Those benefits allow companies to run tests, build new systems and adapt quickly. Best of all, businesses can see a faster time to market.

Successful Hybrid Cloud Deployments Call for New Tools

It’s important to consider that the changes required to enable a hybrid cloud can be risky and time-consuming, so different tools may be needed to protect the environments that are created. To address and avoid risk, businesses need to invest in security and immediate recovery solutions.

Traditional migration and disaster recovery methods based on individual pieces of hardware can disrupt the production systems they protect and are no longer adequate in the hybrid cloud or multiplatform world. By design, those traditional replication, migration and recovery tools are incapable of protecting applications and environments that span multiple platforms.

It’s no surprise that traditional ways of ­protecting applications in purely on-­premises environments won’t suffice in the hybrid cloud world. But the hybrid cloud continues to offer numerous advantages.

Ensure your business does its due diligence and takes the right steps to get there, and you’ll uncover significant rewards.