Best of both worlds: the journey to the hybrid cloud

Adoption: getting the best of both worlds
Hybrid cloud refers to a coordinated approach to the use and management of internal and external cloud services. A recent survey from Flexera revealed that 58% of companies are planning to introduce hybrid cloud into their IT strategies, to balance workloads and services across the public cloud and their own on-premise equipment. This is an uplift from 51% from the year before, which despite not being a huge increase, showcases recognition in the market that hybrid cloud strategies can offer the best of both.

Reaping business value from a hybrid cloud strategy
The main value of cloud-based services arguably lies in supporting digital business transformation. Graduating to the cloud typically starts with proofs of concept, front office software as service applications, new native cloud application development, and some front-office functions. Meaning that these companies are able to use scalable public clouds for dynamic workloads, while leaving less volatile or more sensitive workloads to a private cloud or on-premise data centre.

The primary benefit of a hybrid model is the ability to build and extend towards the cloud and benefit from the enhanced organisational agility this may bring, such as its support for elasticity. Equally, the cloud can prove more cost effective, allowing businesses to eliminate the initial outlay of capital expenses to build additional servers, power and data storage facilities, and instead operate on a pay-as-you-go basis. In addition, the hybrid cloud gives businesses the ability to scale their on-premise infrastructure to the public cloud, which eliminates the need to make hugely expensive adjustments to handle short-term spikes in demand.

Hybrid cloud solutions therefore offer flexibility. Investing in a hybrid infrastructure gives organisations the flexibility of working in a public cloud with non-sensitive data and basic computing tasks, all while keeping the business applications and data on-premise, safely stored behind the company’s firewall.

For example, when a financial services firm decides to run its mobile apps and digital technology using both private and public platforms. Things like marketing and sales apps – used for cross-sell and up-sell – are often  found in the public cloud, compared to services that the bank supplies, such as balance inquiries, where there is sensitive financial or customer information. For security or privacy reasons this is often kept on either a private cloud and/or on-premises.

Some complexities to consider…

Architectural considerations can add complexity to the hybrid cloud deployment process. That’s because different components of the architecture can reside on-premises and/or in the cloud. For example, the analytics database may reside on-premises and the tools and applications, such as the BI tool or dashboard, that connect to it can be in the cloud. In this mode it becomes increasingly important to the success of a hybrid configuration to understand the characteristics around where data flows between on-premises and the cloud, as well as expected data volumes. These aspects will impact factors such as latency, application performance and query times as data is moved between on-premises and the cloud. Moreover, there maybe financial implications too as some cloud providers charge data transfer fees for data flowing in and/or out of their cloud. So a set-up that has significant amounts of data moving out of the cloud may actually turn out to be cost prohibitive in some cases.

Hybrid cloud solutions also shine a spotlight on an organisation’s own data centre operations – especially if they don’t have a skilled data team on board. In its essence, the hybrid cloud – whether delivered by public cloud platform service providers or through private on-prem server installations – can have differing connection protocols across public, private and hybrid, which can cause points of incongruous connection. Even then, when integration is successful initially, any alterations made by the public cloud provider has the possibility of stalling operations on the hybrid cloud, and may require revisions which are likely to prove costly and time-consuming.

While these inherent complexities may throw up barriers to adoption for some businesses, they shouldn’t hold back progress or stop organisations from being ambitious wth their data. These are issues that are all vital during design and implementation stages of hybrid cloud infrastructures, and part of the growing pains any business must go through in their journey to digital transformation when it comes to getting genuine business value from their data.

Ultimately, hybrid models can help manage fluctuating levels of demand for data access and processing power, as well as future-proof an organisation. The corporate technology landscape is fast moving, and hybrid cloud leaves room for businesses to be agile and react to shifts in demand, while also allowing them to be free to work with their data in the way that best suits the specific needs of their organisation.