The cloud has become an immensely popular technology over the last decade. According to an estimate, 95% of the organizations are already using the cloud in one form or the other. Out of these, around 67% have adopted a hybrid cloud strategy. Gartner has predicted that the hybrid cloud model will dominate public and private clouds in the coming times.
In this blog, we will discuss what a hybrid cloud is and why you should use it for your business.
What is Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing model that utilizes a combination of two or more deployments. It commonly includes both public and private clouds, but may include co-location and on-premise IT as well. A hybrid cloud is a suitable option if the data across your environment has different levels of sensitivity. With a hybrid cloud strategy, you can leverage the public cloud for non-sensitive data and the private cloud for business-critical functions.
Hybrid cloud providers offer an orchestration layer that allows data and workloads to move between public and private models. This gives you the flexibility to operate in a fast-moving business environment.
Why should you use Hybrid Cloud for your Business?
Here are some reasons why you should use a hybrid cloud for your business.
Keeping Sensitive Data and Applications Private:
The public cloud is enticing as it is highly scalable and cost-effective but most organizations are reluctant to keep their sensitive customer or proprietary data and applications on the easily-accessible public cloud. That’s where a hybrid cloud comes into the picture. Hybrid cloud providers allow you to host your critical or sensitive workloads on an on-premise private cloud while using a public cloud to store less-critical resources (e.g. development workloads and backup data).
Accommodate Fluctuating Workloads:
A hybrid cloud offers a cost-effective way of extending your capabilities into the cloud. A hybrid cloud model eradicates the need for building a data center to accommodate a spike in demand. All you need to do is to add capacity using a public cloud provider when the demand surges and scale it down when the demand slumps. For instance, if you have developed a mobile application, you can run it in a private cloud under normal circumstances but take benefit of the public cloud when the demand spikes.
Leverage Big Data Analytics:
Big data was one of the reasons why the cloud became insanely popular. A hybrid cloud model offers the scalability, compute power, and elastic resources needed to manage analytical operations.
Every organization, regardless of size and industry, produces a massive amount of data every single day. The data generated during customer transactions, email communication and website visits, etc. can be leveraged to produce eye-opening insights that can help organizations enhance their offerings, remove operational bottlenecks and augment profits.
Since the public cloud is much easier to scale when carrying out tasks requiring distributed computing, you can store data in the private cloud and carry out analytical operations based on this data in the public cloud.
Accelerate Deployment of New Applications:
As discussed above, one of the common applications of the hybrid cloud is to keep critical data and workloads in the private cloud and switch to the public cloud when you need resources for less sensitive development or testing activities.
Let us assume you are developing a new mobile application to serve your customers better. You can use the private cloud to execute key research and development activities and the public cloud for testing and quality assurance. And, since the cloud provides you with virtually unlimited resources, you can concurrently develop and test multiple applications. All this speeds up the deployment process and improves the time-to-market.
Prepare better for a Disaster:
Disaster recovery is one of the key benefits of deploying a hybrid cloud environment. In the absence of a viable cloud solution, disaster recovery is often expensive and resource-heavy. With hybrid cloud providers in place, you plan better for a disaster while availing cost benefits.
A hybrid cloud strategy ensures your business is safeguarded against failure at a physical location, which can either be yours or that of your service provider. When you back up data on the cloud, it is available even in the face of a natural disaster, technical failure, or human error. For this reason, many enterprises have begun using multiple public cloud platforms to mitigate risk.
Improve Cash Flow:
These days, companies tend to overstrain their IT budget as their infrastructure needs escalate. A hybrid cloud is ideal for businesses that fail to accommodate the growing user demand with their on-premise infrastructure. Hybrid cloud providers allow businesses to rent additional capacity from a public cloud when they need it instead of investing capital in expanding their data centers. This helps them augment and regulate cash flow.
Better Customer Experience:
Hybrid cloud solutions allow businesses to enhance the customer experience in every possible way. By accelerating the development and deployment of applications, the hybrid cloud model allows them to respond more quickly to evolving consumer demands. For instance, organizations in the healthcare sector can use hybrid clouds to interact with patient data in real-time.
Wrapping it up
A hybrid cloud model coalesces the benefits of public and private clouds allowing organizations to get the most from their infrastructure while gaining access to additional resources as needed. Hybrid cloud providers, secure business-critical data, accommodate variable workloads, speed up the deployment of applications, leverage big data capabilities, plan for disasters, augment cash flow and, most importantly, enrich customer experience. All this paves way for a stable and innovative future.