Why a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure?

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Why a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure?

May 1, 2020 Viyu Network Solutions Comments Off

According to one study, hybrid cloud adoption is at 58%, with 84% of businesses that use cloud technology leveraging a multi-cloud strategy. Combining your private cloud infrastructure with public cloud resources creates a hybrid cloud infrastructure that offers you more flexibility with greater cost effectiveness.

What Is Hybrid Cloud?

To understand how a hybrid cloud infrastructure can help your business, it helps to know exactly what it is. The term “hybrid cloud” is applied to many services, but in the most technical sense, it’s defined as a combination of public and private cloud resources.

Generally, public clouds are run from off-premises resources, while private clouds are based on in-premises infrastructure. The combination of your in-house resources with external services make for a hybrid solution that can be tailored and scaled to your needs.

Uses of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Hybrid cloud infrastructure expands on your in-house capabilities in the following ways:

Expanded processing capacity

If your in-house resources are fairly limited, combining those with public cloud services can help you build upon your existing capabilities. If you’re looking to expand upon your current data processing capacity, a hybrid cloud infrastructure can help you meet that need without having to invest in extra infrastructure.

This is especially useful if your business has a variable workload. If you need to increase your capacity temporarily to support a short-term project, you’ll be able to do so within a hybrid environment without having to worry about expanding your in-house infrastructure.

Separating data and workloads

Some of the information you work with is highly sensitive, and it needs to be well protected. However, a lot of your data may not warrant stringent security measures. Hybrid cloud hosting for your data allows you to manage private data on your own servers while storing less critical data externally.

Testing cloud processing

If you’re looking to upgrade to cloud processing, you can test it out with a hybrid solution. Doing so allows you to try cloud hosting without investing heavily in internal IT infrastructure.

A hybrid cloud infrastructure will also allow you to gradually shift your IT over to a cloud environment, saving you the costs and disruption of changing over all at once.

Business continuity

One final use for hybrid cloud solutions is to act as part of your business continuity plan. By keeping backups of your data on external public servers, you’re able to preserve critical information in the event of a disaster. It also gives you a way to continue business operations if you’re suddenly unable to host your software in-house.

Advantages of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Hybrid cloud infrastructure offers the advantages of private and public hosting while mitigating some of the risks of each. As such, hybrid cloud offers the following benefits:

Cost savings

The more data you manage, the more it will cost to handle it all in house. You not only need storage space, but also hardware that can handle higher volumes of traffic and staff/processes to monitor it all. The end result is a high initial investment with continued overhead afterward.

Hybrid solutions allow you to outsource a portion of your cloud-based processes on an as-needed basis without the heavy investment and maintenance costs of a pure in-house solution.

Scalability

After the high upfront costs of in-house cloud infrastructure, you’re unlikely to utilize it all at any given time. Hybrid cloud infrastructure lets you scale your capacity up and down, which means you pay only for as much data as you use.

Reliability

Hybrid cloud solutions give you the capacity to build redundancy into your processes. The end result is a more reliable IT environment that can keep running if your internal processes are diminished for any reason.

Backup storage is another item that’s made easy with hybrid solutions, making them a great part of any disaster recovery plan.

Is Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Right for You?

To determine whether hybrid cloud infrastructure is right for you, consider the following questions.

  • What are your data processing needs? Hybrid cloud infrastructure can help you scale upward without heavy investments.
  • Are your needs constant or variable? If your data processing requirements tend to vary based on seasons, projects, and so forth, then you would likely benefit from a hybrid cloud solution.
  • What are your plans for the future? Hybrid cloud can help you expand your capacity to support future growth.

Seeing how roughly 60% of workloads are projected to be run from hosted cloud services, combining external services with your in-house IT is a natural next step for many businesses. To see whether hybrid cloud infrastructure is right for you, contact us.