Use of cloud services has been on the rise in recent years, and the recent surge in remote work has ushered in a new era of adoption. One progress report indicated that 56% of respondents were actively planning cloud migration projects in May 2020.
It makes sense: an increased need for work-from-anywhere (WFA) benefits and a desire for long-term savings and flexibility are driving growth in enterprise cloud solutions. But perhaps a bit surprising, though, is the fact that more than 90% of businesses all over the world will likely rely on hybrid cloud infrastructures by 2022.
Why are organizations moving to enterprise cloud solutions? And what does hybrid cloud mean?
In this article, we’ll explore the answers to both questions and outline six reasons why a move to hybrid cloud services should be a part of your data management strategy in 2021.
What is Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud architecture is a set of cloud solutions that incorporates a combination of 2 or more different environments, with at least one environment being a public or private cloud space.
Hybrid cloud has emerged as the logical middle between 100% on-premises (on-prem) infrastructure and full cloud migration.
By now, the benefits of using cloud solutions are fairly well known. The question, then, is what are the benefits of a hybrid cloud strategy?
Here are six reasons to make hybrid cloud part of your 2021 data management strategy:
1. Practicality
Cloud-native solutions — solutions built for and run exclusively in the cloud — are widely considered the gold standard for cloud infrastructure. However, migrating your enterprise’s full suite of applications and systems into the cloud can take a long time.
Migrating smaller chunks of resources at a time can be helpful to organizations that want to take advantage of the benefits of cloud storage and computing without having to wait for their entire stack to be ready to go.
2. Security & Control
Some organizations, such as government agencies or financial institutions, want to avoid leaving highly sensitive data in the hands of a public cloud service provider. Although public cloud solutions are becoming more secure, data kept in public cloud storage will never be as secure as data kept in a secure private cloud used by a single organization.
Hybrid cloud storage lets you leverage powerful and convenient cloud solutions and choose which digital assets you want to store in the cloud.
3. Flexibility
Digital assets within an enterprise can be highly sensitive or require low latency, so it makes sense to store them in a private cloud with high-performance compute, storage and network nodes. For everything else, businesses can take advantage of public cloud solutions for their scalability and cost-effectiveness.
4. Cost
Because private clouds offer more control and greater security, in most cases private cloud services tend to be more expensive than hybrid cloud solutions — regardless of whether they are strictly on-prem or hosted by a third-party provider. Hybrid cloud solution is a happy medium to offset some of those costs.
For companies with assets under strict regulatory controls for security, migrating assets that aren’t so highly regulated onto a public cloud solution can help cut operating costs while providing the flexibility of a hybrid solution.
5. Data Recovery
Hybrid cloud storage is an excellent data recovery solution. Many hybrid solutions back up data both locally and in one or more offsite locations. With hybrid cloud services, IT managers can ensure their operations stay online even in the event of unforeseen disasters.
As any downtime can represent significant losses for a business, a hybrid, multifaceted form of cloud backup and storage provides more redundancy and peace of mind.
6. Support
Managed cloud solutions have been likened to real estate because they make for a convenient illustration of the difference between public and private clouds:
- A private cloud can be thought of as renting a house.
- A public cloud is more like renting an apartment building.
One of the best benefits of living in a (high-quality) apartment is cost and maintenance. Many people who could otherwise afford to live in houses choose to stay in apartments or condos simply because they prefer not to deal with the maintenance concerns associated with individual houses. They sacrifice luxuries and features for cost and convenience. Tenants in an apartment building shares common areas and proximity with others which could mean less privacy and security.
Private cloud is rich in features and often boasts its performance and security once fine-tuned properly. It’s an attractive solution for a centralized local use case requiring high-performance computing and low latency network in a tightly controlled environment.
Service providers like Global IP Networks operate and manage public, private and hybrid clouds so there’s no need for in-house IT support to deal with maintenance issues that may arise.
Depending on the size of the organization and the levels of access granted to different teams, it may be more cost-effective to host resources that require access by the most people on public clouds so that they can take advantage of third-party managed cloud support services such as those offered by Global IP Networks.
If you’re ready to begin your cloud migration or simply have more questions, contact us today to speak with one of our representatives.
