By Srinivas Rao, Sr. Director, System Engineering, Dell Technologies, India
In the recent scenario, organizations around the world are striving to become more flexible by upgrading their IT infrastructure, to steer seamlessly in the era of remote working. And in the current times, looking at how different businesses across segments are adopting work from home models, cloud plays a major role in the digital transformation journey. While the public cloud offers fast deployment, the model is not suitable for many businesses because of potential application, security, and performance issues in the shared infrastructure model, as well as challenges in migrating legacy.
Hence, the answer to IT modernization is the hybrid cloud. A well-designed hybrid cloud optimizes the investment in the on-premise data center while leveraging public cloud and other hosted and services models, such as co-location, managed hosting and managed services. Hence, here are a few things that every organization should keep in mind before drafting their hybrid cloud strategies:
Flexible approach – In today’s complex and fast-paced world, flexibility is what CIOs are constantly searching for in their IT architecture. Hybrid cloud solution offers businesses the flexibility to choose what pertains to their needs in any specific scenario. So depending on their IT requirements, businesses should deploy the best-in-class applications that allow for flexible policy-driven deployment and for equal distribution of workloads
Scalability – An organization’s IT strategy is a mixture of multiple elements and a predominant one among them is scalability, which is an essential part of any business aspiring to grow and expand. Hence, businesses need a cloud solution that is scalable in nature and increases the output with the implementation of additional resources. While adopting a hybrid cloud approach, organizations must make sure that their strategy allows them to scale their businesses when needed
Security – With cyber-attacks on the rise, security is an essential ingredient of any IT strategy to protect the network’s private data, its users and their devices. In current times when most of the employees are working from home, it becomes even more essential. Thus, a hybrid cloud approach is required that addresses the security needs of businesses across industries, ensuring no loss / misplacement of data
Cost Efficiency – Today businesses are operating with tight budgets. However, IT investment still remains a prime concern for organizations and businesses are increasingly scouting for a budget-friendly approach. Businesses should adopt a hybrid cloud model that simplifies their IT operations, improve the customer experience, attain total control and visibility of their cloud infrastructure, and reduce the total cost of ownership.
To conclude, the effective transition to the hybrid cloud can be a complex process, and organizations often struggle to make the various infrastructure components work together and deploy workloads in a hybrid configuration. Hybrid cloud is more than a technology for most businesses; it is part of a broader transformation initiative to help IT departments support changing business needs and therefore, any business must keep the above pointers in mind, while deploying such solutions.
