By Sujith Dinakar, Sr.Staff Dev Ops Engineer, Blackhawk Network India
Cloud computing, which bolstered the global economy, supply chains, and remote workforces during the pandemic, will continue to be a constant target for organisations looking for increased scalability, business stability, and cost efficiency. Hybrid cloud technologies have become virtually ubiquitous. Their ability to bypass the binding constraints of legacy systems has motivated many organisations to adopt them to reduce cost, improve collaboration, and scale their business. By rapidly embracing hybrid cloud, organisations are modernising their IT strategies to remain relevant in the competitive market. Moreover, a hybrid cloud ecosystem enables digital transformation and helps organisations build more flexible and secure enterprise capabilities.
There are various factors organisations should consider while determining if a hybrid cloud is the correct choice for them. A hybrid infrastructure allows businesses to easily and efficiently customise workload placement based on requirements and applications. This means that some workloads can remain on-premises and on a private cloud, while others can be operated on a public cloud. Hybrid cloud infrastructure offers the flexibility and scalability of the cloud while enabling a business to run tools for mission-critical applications in private. This allows businesses to add resources and make changes to suit higher demand more efficiently and quickly.
Let us take a closer look at the advantages associated with the hybrid cloud deployment model:
Flexibility and Scalability- Integrating public and private cloud solutions allow organisations to have increased control over their data as well as promotes stakeholders to choose from environments that best suit each use case. This means taking advantage of the delivery method, either private or public, while lowering the risk of choosing just one. The resources can be allocated to either a private or a public cloud depending on the requirement. This can also enable the organisation to easily scale up and down based on business needs.
Security- Security is a challenge for any business running on a public cloud. When compared to a public cloud-only environment, a hybrid cloud offers a higher level of security which allows a business to have control over machine critical data. With the hybrid solution, an organisation gets to decide which application and services can operate on a public cloud and the ones that can run on a private cloud.
Cost Efficiency- A hybrid cloud deployment model can benefit organisations that cannot afford to invest in a private data center, as well as those that need to scale cost-effectively. It is highly effective as it gives the ability to rapidly scale data and applications as and when required. This way the organisation only needs to pay for the additional resources when needed. Hybrid cloud adopters can balance their need to be cost-efficient while keeping their most sensitive and critical workloads secure on a private cloud. Moreover, this model needs much less space on-premises compared to a strictly private model.
It is highly unlikely to predict the future of application growth and the need for expanding the resources. A hybrid solution will allow organisations to allocate resources for short-term projects at a lower cost when compared to an on-premises solution. It will also help them reduce short-term overinvestment on resources. To balance between cost, performance, and returns, a hybrid data-center approach is a brilliant solution. Cloud connectivity allows organisations to scale resources and deploy virtual machines in just a few minutes. Embracing a hybrid datacenter allows businesses to retain legacy infrastructure while reducing their expenses. By choosing the hybrid approach, organisations can get the best of both worlds and unfold limitless possibilities.
