Should Your Enterprise Go The Hybrid Cloud Way?

Cloud infrastructure allows enterprises to discard costly on-premise resources in favor of the flexibility of an elastic environment. But many are still hesitant to entirely replace their legacy systems because on-premise IT infrastructure guarantees greater compliance, data control, availability, and strict security measures necessary for some the most data-sensitive industries. The ones that have to follow unusually strict government regulations (e.g., HIPAA, PCI and SOX) for data security compliance do prefer to stick with private clouds instead of hybrid options, as in the healthcare or the credit card industry. Nevertheless, a hybrid cloud storage system is reliable, secure, scalable, and cost effective for enterprises.
hybrid cloud approach ensures substantial cost savings. Instead of having to spend the money on building infrastructure for increased bursts of system usage that happen occasionally, companies can leverage public cloud to offload some of the heavy usage when it exceeds the capacity of their private space, and pay for it only as it is needed. This frees up funds for other critical projects to grow the business.

hybrid cloud network provides companies the flexibility, on-demand resources and pay-as-you-go flexibility of the public cloud, along with the capability for control over critical applications, as you would enjoy with a private cloud model. Hybrid cloud solutions allow smooth communication between the public and private cloud infrastructure over an encrypted connection and advanced technology for data and application portability.

With the hybrid cloud storage environment, enterprises can manage their resources on- or off-premise.  It allows companies to keep high-risk information behind the firewall of the private cloud and run local cache & memory for sensitive data. Moreover, this confidential data has a physical presence and is also easily retrievable, which may be essential for some types of businesses, whereas less sensitive data can be stored in the public cloud with data encryption & duplication features and no concerns about scalability.

In the 21st century enterprise, business happens 24/7 and hybrid cloud solutions merge both cloud and on-premise resources to provide easy and greater accessibility to business-critical applications.

Challenges Of Shifting To A Hybrid Cloud

When designing your hybrid cloud, you will need to tailor your IT infrastructure and hardware for the specific demands of your workloads in order to avoid wasted resources, performance problems, or improper capacity allocation. You also have to consider personnel requirements for proper management and maintenance of the system. A truly hybrid IT infrastructure provides enterprise-class hardware that you can be self-managed or fully-managed from a cloud hosting provider. Your current hardware, performance requirements, network configuration characteristics, and access to domain experts in storage, networking, and virtualization will dictate the proper mix when building the right hybrid cloud solution for your enterprise. You will also need to factor in different costs of cloud resource usage when planning to execute a hybrid cloud strategy.

There will be different security or varying levels of compliance requirements for different workloads that may have an influence on your IT infrastructure hosting environment. Take into consideration necessary security measures when building a hybrid cloud so that your data is properly protected and you have proper data control.

With dual infrastructure for hybrid cloud solutions, you need to ensure compatibility across both private and public infrastructure. There also has to be a symbiotic relationship between data and application integration, as each one is useless without the other. When building your hybrid cloud structure, do consider the infrastructure to store each of your applications on. If your application cannot access the data remotely, you may need to use technologies such as copy data virtualization to decouple data from infrastructure.