According to the 2019 report by Flexera enterprises with a hybrid strategy grew to 58% in 2019 from 51% in 2018.
What is a hybrid cloud?
A hybrid cloud environment aids in workload mobility, integration, and management across multiple computing environments. The foundation of a hybrid cloud model is the blend of private and public cloud infrastructures to allow workloads to move between the two interconnected environments. This mobility between cloud environments aides organizations with greater flexibility and agility in the data deployment options. The architecture of every hybrid cloud environment is different depending on the business requirements and organizational goals.
Pros of moving to Hybrid cloud
Better support for a remote workforce
A hybrid cloud option gives organizations versatile support to their remote and distributed employees by providing on-demand access to data that isn’t tied to one central location. They can easily transfer their core or sensitive data to private (on-premise) servers while keeping necessary applications and services on the public cloud.
Reduced costs
The hybrid cloud option gives the privilege to organizations to host their core, business-critical, and sensitive data on their private(on-premise servers) while shifting the remaining data and applications to the public cloud. On top of it whenever there is a sudden surge of data load organizations with the hybrid cloud have the advantage to scale up the infrastructure instead of adding hardware which eliminates huge capital investments for uncertain data loads.
Improved scalability and control
A hybrid cloud environment aids businesses with efficient and automatic needs evolve and the demand for IT services fluctuates, organizations can scale their workloads accordingly.
On top of that, the On-prem cloud gives the flexibility to scale up the data load automatically as per changing demand requirements, thereby optimizing performance and efficiency without personal intervention.
Increased agility and innovation
The ability to respond automatically to changing needs is a key factor for innovation and sustaining competition. Agility and speed are key important factors for today’s businesses to sustain the competition.
A hybrid cloud model helps organizations increase their speed by optimizing IT performance and providing the agility to meet the ever-changing business demands.
Business continuity
Hybrid cloud models improve business continuity and reduce potential downtime and maintenance, due to the advantage of business continuity in the event of a failure or disaster normally with minimal downtime or interruption as it helps businesses back up their mission-critical key data and ensuring scalability as per the requirements.
Improved security and risk management
Hybrid cloud computing aids businesses with crucial control on their data and improving security by reducing the potential risk of data disclosure. Enterprises can choose where to host their data workloads based on compliance, policy, or security requirements and work on redundant cloud storage, which is an important aspect of disaster recovery and data insurance.
Hybrid cloud’s centralized management makes it easier to implement technical security measures such as encryption, automation, access control, orchestration, and endpoint security to mitigate risk effectively.
Cons of moving to Hybrid cloud
The above mentioned are some of the advantages of a hybrid cloud model, there are even several disadvantages that may outweigh the positive advantages depending on the business’s architecture, requirements, priorities, and budget the hybrid cloud model may not be a suitable fit, some of them are listed below for your better understanding:
Hardware costs
One of the advantages of a hybrid cloud model is it edges businesses with great flexibility and customization as per the business priorities. However, with those benefits comes huge initial hardware costs as organizations still have to maintain and regularly invest in on-premise hardware and maintenance to manage their private cloud computing needs. While the public cloud operations might mask up the hardware costs which will ultimately depend on the organization and its business requirements.
Lack of visibility
The cloud environments are not very easy to understand they are very complex and the division of your business computing environments across two or more clouds is an even more complicated operation. It is very challenging to establish a clear roadmap of the entire cloud environment, including various systems, processes, applications, and platforms. Definitely, without a proper understanding of your business architecture and operations, there is a high risk that your business might face critical issues and a high risk of potentially fall on the wrong side of compliance regulations.
Is a hybrid cloud right for you?
I think by now, you might have got understood the pros and cons of adapting to hybrid cloud-based solutions, depending on your current business requirements and priorities. On the note of Conclusion, the hybrid cloud model is a perfect option for businesses looking to maintain sensitive data while giving an edge to the scalability of operations automatically.