Getting Hybrid Right
 

Hybrid cloud is winning praise as the way to go for enterprises. But you’ll need the right management platform to make multiple cloud environments work seamlessly.

Flexibility, compelling features, and freedom of choice are all reasons why IT decision makers are gravitating to hybrid cloud environments — a mix of on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud services with orchestration between them.

Hybrid clouds allow companies to achieve infinite scaling and give them the flexibility to move between private and public cloud environments for different features and to maintain firm control over their different workloads. Hybrid cloud adoption is growing, but it could be growing faster. Why isn’t it? Because companies are unsure how to manage these complex, multi-vendor environments, and are wary of recoding, retraining, and adding complexity within their IT departments.

But there’s a better way beyond DIY. Read on.

Hybrid Is Hot

Companies have learned that not all workloads are suitable for public cloud services. Public cloud can be expensive and inflexible. Security mandates, for example, may require data locality and that may rule out the use of public cloud if the vendor has no datacenters in required areas. The other problem with putting all of your eggs in the public cloud basket is a lack of granular control of workloads. The Enterprise Cloud Index 2019 found that 73% of respondents have repatriated their workloads back to their own premises from public clouds due to other issues, like the need to retrain their IT resources and the challenge of hiring new ones from a limited pool of cloud talent.

A 2018 study by IDC cited in Network World found that 56% of organizations surveyed use both private and public clouds for the same workload. Another 8% of companies use one type of cloud service for production and another for testing, development, backup, or analytics.

The flexibility of being able to choose the right cloud for different apps, use cases, and cost models is very attractive, so are features like data locality for compliance mandates and burstable services in different geographies to support periods of high demand. Security is actually perceived to be superior in the hybrid cloud model over other clouds and even better than on-premise, non-cloud-enabled datacenters, according to a study featured in CIO Magazine.