Hybrid cloud refers to a cloud-computing infrastructure that merges a public cloud environment with a private cloud system by facilitating seamless sharing of data and applications between them. This allows businesses to scale their on-site private cloud infrastructure to the public cloud to manage the additional data processing and computing demand at any point in time.
Using a hybrid cloud allows companies to make use of the flexibility and computing power of the public cloud environment for non-sensitive and routine tasks. At the same time, they can continue managing their business-critical applications and data on their private cloud infrastructure secured by a robust company firewall. From superior control and flexibility to better cost savings, there are a lot of advantages of choosing a hybrid cloud strategy. Below are 10 benefits that make the hybrid cloud a productive solution for businesses across all industries.
1. Business Continuity
Business continuity is one of the vital aspects of a company’s business operations. Having a reliable business continuity plan not just means backing up all the company-sensitive data on the cloud servers, but also adopting the right measures to ensure that the data management processes will not be affected in any way in case of an emergency. A hybrid cloud can help not just to keep the critical data safe, but will also allow you to run the operations as usual by using the public cloud resources in case a disaster hits your business operations.
So, how can businesses make the move to the hybrid cloud for business continuity?
Determining which applications will bring the most value in a move to the cloud should be the starting point. From there you move on to address the technology trade-offs, such as selecting the best approach to migrate the application and deal with important issues such as security, governance, and disaster recovery. In this way, you can modernize your application development processes and technology to make the most out of your newly deployed hybrid cloud.
This is where businesses have to pay a custom software development team providing cloud services for a while.
2. ecurity
Many businesses are still skeptical about implementing a 100% public cloud strategy and cite security concerns as the reason. A hybrid cloud environment can help to bridge the gap here by allowing you to keep the sensitive data on a dedicated private cloud infrastructure. However, major players in the enterprise cloud industry employ high-end security measures to protect their servers in top-tier facilities. So, you can also go the other way around and keep your sensitive data on the public cloud, while running routine business operations using the private cloud resources.
3. Network Performance
Latency and network issues are common cloud computing problems that often lead to slow and inadequately performing applications. This can have a severe effect on the user experience and harm the reputation of your business. In most cases, finding and fixing the network and latency problems can be quite difficult as well. Adopting a hybrid cloud strategy keeps you free from such issues by allowing you to enjoy enhanced network performance. As a hybrid cloud balances the load, distance-based latency can be reduced as well by delivering services from a location that is close to the end-user.
4. Scalability
Scaling on-premises cloud infrastructure can be very difficult for rapidly growing businesses. Aside from addressing the current situation, you will need to project your resource utilization for future endeavors and make the right investments to meet those demands as well. This can be very expensive, and sometimes, inefficient too. By choosing a hybrid cloud environment, you can scale the computing and data processing resources on your own terms to deal with your growing business needs. You can even implement automation rules within the cloud infrastructure to scale the resources up and down as required by your business.
5. Control
Another advantage of implementing a hybrid cloud strategy is that it gives you more control over all the aspects of the IT infrastructure. You do not need to entrust everything to a third-party cloud service vendor as it is with public cloud solutions; instead, you can customize the private end of your hybrid cloud model to meet your specific needs and modify the rules as required to fit your business demands. You can also have your internal IT staff continue managing the critical operations as well as routine maintenance and updating of the servers and other infrastructure.
6. Reduced Costs
A hybrid cloud strategy can be a cost-effective solution for businesses looking for robust security and scalability options to meet the rising operational demands. As migrating to the hybrid cloud option allows you to continue running the core operations and business-critical data on your private servers, it does not require investing any huge capital to expand the current IT infrastructure. Off-loading day-to-day business tasks and non-sensitive data and applications to the public cloud helps to keep the costs manageable, as you only need to pay for the cloud resources you use.
7. Increased Agility
You need to be able to respond quickly to the changes in demand to remain competitive in the market. A hybrid cloud model can help your business to boost the speed to market by optimizing IT performance and ensuring that you have the agility required to meet the changing industry demands. As you are not limited to your on-premise infrastructure, you can easily extend your workload on the cloud when there is a spike in demand. This helps you to quickly develop, test, and deploy new applications and services in the market.
8. Risk Management
A hybrid cloud gives you the best way to test your business capabilities around different kinds of workloads and plan your cloud strategy effectively. It is known that the cloud environment can be a bit complex to navigate at times, which is why you should plan your risk management policies well to make sure that things will always remain in the favor of your business. You can test non-sensitive workloads on the cloud environment before moving more critical applications. This way, you can understand how to make the most of deploying the hybrid cloud model.
