What are the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud for Businesses?

There’s no doubt that everyone is full-on in love with the cloud these days, and for many good reasons. The cloud has treated us well and continues to give us many reasons to continue to embrace it. However, there still a common misconception due to the nebulous nature of it, especially when it comes to hybrid cloud architectures and the advantages they have over public or private clouds.

There’s a good reason for this lack of clear understanding, and it stems from the fact that hybrid cloud is not a technology, but more of an approach to how we use cloud, especially when compared to public and private clouds. If you look for a cut-and-dried hybrid cloud solution that cookie-cutter fits in your organization, you’ll find yourself forlorn.  Benefits of hybrid cloud are really more about how you manage and orchestrate your public and private cloud resources into one, cohesive hybrid cloud solution, and in this solution, your applications and data live in one or both clouds.

There are many factors that go into deciding on where your workloads best fit: the critical nature of the data, latency, redundancy, required implementation speed, etc. But the beauty of the hybrid cloud solution (and why we love it so) is that your end-users have no idea where their application or data lives, because to them, the experience is the same. With careful upfront planning on where each workload should reside, it will be placed where it will serve the business best, making it a win-win for both IT and the end user.

So, if you are considering hybrid cloud, what are some top hybrid cloud benefits you might enjoy?

• Secure data and applications: As businesses grow and change, IT constantly struggles to stay ahead of security and compliance issues. Hybrid clouds enable IT to leverage cloud provider expertise, infrastructure and processes to ensure critical applications and services remain patched, secure and compliant.
• Manage Shadow IT: Going the hybrid cloud route ensures IT can quickly and efficiently address the needs of business units. Many IT departments have a broker of services that users access dynamically on demand using a self-service model to minimize Shadow IT. Consequently, business units consider IT a partner, not a hurdle to bypass it to get work done.
• Achieve scalability: Hybrid clouds allow IT to scale to capacity as needed and handle peak loads and seasonal variations, and just as easily decrease capacity (and costs) when demand is lower.
• Cut costs: IT is often tasked with competing mandates to provide more, better, faster service at reduced costs. Moving to hybrid cloud helps both shorten time to market and reduce expenses by offloading new, expensive workloads to the cloud.
• Maintain control: With hybrid cloud, IT can manage and maintain sensitive workloads on-premises, while offloading less-critical applications and services to the cloud. Such flexibility means IT can apply processing power and capacity where needed to deliver consistent security and performance, across even the most distributed organizations.
• Ensure performance, reliability and availability: By offloading workloads to the cloud as needed, IT is freed up to focus on more value-added tasks like application development and operational improvement. This ensures IT applications and services maintain the highest performance, reliability and availability, even as the business grows.
• Implement new capabilities and innovative technology: Instead of investing in expensive software and infrastructure as technology evolves, hybrid clouds ensure IT can always access the latest technologies and releases in the cloud. In addition, IT can always match the right workload to the right infrastructure, be it on-premises, in the cloud or both.

These are just some of the hybrid cloud benefits you can bring to your organization, but if you want to see even more specifically the impact it might have for your unique environment, consider one of our Hybrid Cloud Assessments. Hybrid cloud has an obvious potential to benefit many organizations; however, it is dependent on each distinctive situation and the desired outcome. There is rarely a one solution fits all scenario when it comes to complex IT infrastructure, so a hybrid cloud solution needs to be approached as customized as your needs are. But don’t be afraid of it – take the leap, and you just might fall in love.

Want to discover more benefits of hybrid cloud?  Read our Buyers Guide to Hybrid Cloud.

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