Achieve Better Business Agility With The Hybrid Cloud

The main benefit of Hybrid Cloud is that it provides companies with the option to own their cloud base and rent additional space per use, when demand spikes due to random unplanned events. To be honest maintaining any type of infrastructure that is mostly unused is costly and now with the cloud available, utterly unnecessary.

Cloud’s cost effective manner of handling the peaks of IT loads helps businesses manage the changing demands while maintaining the optimal level of performance and security their customers expect and demand.

Combining the private and public clouds enable companies to deliver optimal service and ensure protection of sensitive data even with the strict budget.

Modern business leaders are expected to create technology strategies that ensure their companies achieve positive business outcomes. But at the same time they have to be aware of risks that may be introduced with new technologies. Hybrid cloud provides a simple solution. The flexibility, security and policy management that is an essential part of hybrid clouds empowers top management to quickly respond to the needs of their company and changing market conditions. In essence, hybrid clouds provide companies with the level of control offered by private cloud solutions and variety of public cloud options for other workloads.

                                                            Image Credit: IStock

Control Is The Central Part Of Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud requires an integration of private and public domains where control is critical. When devising their hybrid cloud strategy, businesses need to consider how they will be controlling sensitive customer information and infrastructure in order to minimize security risks. On the other hand they also need to consider how to manage operational processes in order to optimize the use of in-house resources, as well as customer experience.

Here is the short list of points to consider:

• How will a company manage security of their workloads and ensure security of business critical data in a hybrid cloud?
• Is there enough of in-house resources capable to operationally manage the implementation across the hybrid cloud?
• Is it possible to maintain same policy control over all workloads regardless of where they are running?

Companies need to address these points in order to make sure they are in control of their hybrid cloud and not the other way around.

 Flexibility Is Essential

 While creating a hybrid cloud strategy, businesses need to make sure that their plan is flexible and can adjust to changing needs.  Before committing to a specific cloud provider, companies should consider the following:

• Does the potential provider offer the cloud solution that is best suited to the particular workload and their business requirements?
• What if company’s needs change?
• Does the potential cloud provider offer the right type of cloud solution (private or public) in line with the company’s hybrid cloud strategy?
• What options does the business have if that type of cloud is not right?
• How can their private cloud interact with other cloud services?

Once business leaders have the answers to these questions they become aware of the opportunity to maximize their choices and create optimal hybrid cloud strategy. At the same time they have the insight needed to add or modify existing cloud services, making the right decisions at the right time for their company.

Business Innovation: Testing And Developing In The Cloud

Hybrid cloud is also the great polygon for innovative projects. Cloud environment is an ideal testing ground for new business applications and services. The ability to develop and test applications at scale – at the same time completely isolated from live workloads in an environment that is identical to the production environment – is the best manner of managing an application lifecycle.

With the cloud, businesses can test their applications, without the risk of impacting their live workloads and at a fraction of the cost of traditional approach with duplicated physical environment. The company only needs to make sure that same policies and configuration is set so that the newly developed workload can be brought into production with minimal disruption.  

Cloud is therefore an encouraging innovation as because it allows companies to focus on developing innovative solutions for their customers and not waste time managing IT costs. Lower costs and increased access to various cloud resources fuel more innovation within a company as more ideas can be tried out while the risk of failure is minimized.

In conclusion

By evaluating and implementing hybrid cloud solutions, business leaders are taking control of the decision-making process and are empowered to introduce new levels of agility and flexibility to their business IT operations. 

Specialized cloud providers such as EverData with their innovative Cloud platforms offer the flexibility that modern businesses require. Centrally managed hybrid clouds provide full control over various private and public cloud resources ensuring that all policies and security requirements are met. Combining and migrating between public and private cloud is a necessity in today’s market. Fully transparent service allows companies to manage their hybrid environments and their costs with an ease.