Top Hybrid Cloud Benefits to Drive Your Transformation

When you’re looking to take your cloud solutions to the next level, public cloud services can offer attractive flexibility, scalability, and affordability. While the public cloud is a great solution, it’s not the only type of cloud solution. There may be applications that work better in a private cloud, especially for businesses that want more control and customization.

The good news is that you don’t need to choose between the two. Some cloud platforms are a better match, depending on the application or workload. You can have both in your IT environment. This combination of cloud platforms is also known as a hybrid cloud environment.

In this blog post, we’ll explain the biggest hybrid cloud benefits.

What is hybrid cloud computing?

You could look at a hybrid cloud solution as a compromise when choosing between public and private clouds, or, better yet, like going to the buffet and grabbing all your favorite things in the portions right for you.

A hybrid cloud environment includes a mix of cloud platforms – private and public clouds are both typically found in a hybrid cloud environment. You may also opt for multicloud, a type of hybrid cloud strategy that includes multiple public cloud platforms within one environment. Learn the difference between hybrid and multicloud environments. The combination and amount of data you have in each piece of your environment is up to you and your organizational needs.

Because it can be fine-tuned to fit you, hybrid infrastructure lends itself well to fast communication networks, high-performance computing environments, and edge computing, delivering a more reliable and efficient experience to your end users.

What benefits are driving businesses to choose hybrid cloud environments?

Top hybrid cloud benefits

Support for a remote workforce

Based on current trends, we should see remote and hybrid work environments continue to increase. By the end of 2022, it’s projected that one-quarter of North America will be remote, with the percentage predicted to increase through 2023. High-paying jobs have gone remote at more than three-fold the rate that existed before the pandemic – from 4% to over 15% today, according to Ladders.

Of course, with this increase in hybrid and remote work environments, businesses also must contend with a threat landscape that is vaster and more tangled than ever. Hosted cloud services can help keep businesses up, running, and secure for remote workforces. Most of these services are designed to run 24/7/365 with extremely reliable uptime.

Controlling cloud spending

Taking on any new project can mean dancing between your ideal scenario and needs and what will fit within your budget. However, whenever you are hampered by expense, you run the risk of closing the door on an innovative idea that can help you get a jump on competitors.

Everyone is trying to evolve their processes and make what they do more user-friendly, as well as amenable to technologies that are made more possible with widespread 5G availability. Managing expenses where you can means you can focus your budget on these groundbreaking projects, not just getting off the ground.

Incorporating the public cloud into your hybrid cloud infrastructure means that you can follow an OpEx (operating expenditures) model over a CapEx (capital expenditures) one, renting what you need when you need it. If demand balloons in one month and wanes the next, you aren’t stuck with hardware and space that isn’t getting used but is driving up expenses. An OpEx model is a cost-effective alternative to making expensive hardware purchases, especially as shortages have driven the price up.

Also read: What’s The Secret to Accelerating Hybrid Cloud Adoption?

Handling IT staffing shortages

The cybersecurity workforce is growing, but it will be hard for the industry to grow at the pace of demand. While the workforce increased from 3.5 million in 2020 to 4.2 million in 2021, there were still 2.7 million unfilled jobs in 2021.

This year’s data doesn’t prove to be much more promising – 63% of respondents in an ISACA report said they had unfilled cybersecurity positions, up from 55% in 2021. For 20% of respondents, it takes over 6 months to fill an open spot, and 63% of them reported open positions.

Between this workforce shortage and The Great Resignation, there are more jobs in IT than there are people to fill them, especially for more specialized roles. You can choose to wait to find the right person, or you can decide to fill the gap with experts who can handle cybersecurity, legacy systems, cloud migration, and anything else you need.

Moving to a hybrid environment can not only be done with the help of an external team, but it can also make your systems easier to use and navigate, meaning you don’t need someone skilled in specific IBM frameworks to come in and manage your hybrid cloud model.

Getting help from a managed cloud provider means you can close gaps in skill at your organization while continuing to modernize and optimize your infrastructure to make more seamless transitions into work for future staff.

Improving security profile to keep clouds secure

Vulnerabilities associated with ransomware increased by 7.6% in Q1 2022. Plus, 11 of these vulnerabilities were not identified by scanners. Keeping security measures up-to-date with the latest information on ransomware is necessary to keep our organization safe.

With a hybrid infrastructure, you can allocate your data in such a way that you can keep your most sensitive data and applications under more stringent security. Implement automation, encryption, and access control based on the risks you are trying to manage with your data and work with a managed cloud provider who can keep you compliant based on your industry’s standards.

Also read: Guide – How to Address and Overcome Hybrid Cloud Complexity

Ensuring business continuity

The most severe global risks to the economy as reported by the World Economic Forum in 2022 include climate action failure and extreme weather, both of which are indicative of natural disasters that can put data at risk. We have seen disruption come in the form of a global pandemic, extreme weather patterns, and cybersecurity data breaches. Your level of preparedness will be what sets you apart from other organizations in the years to come.

If your data infrastructure is housed at a single site, you increase your risk of experiencing downtime or losing precious information. With a hybrid approach, you can enable replication and failover to a completely different geographic site, bypassing disruptions and ensuring redundancy. Cloud technology can help enable more robust backups, and therefore, improved business continuity.

Hybrid cloud next steps

The benefits of the hybrid cloud bring the best of all worlds. Adding a hybrid cloud to your digital transformation journey can drive business results. But before you adopt any cloud platforms, you need to sell your leadership on the cloud in the first place. Sometimes you may be asked “What does the cloud offer that our on-premises infrastructure doesn’t?” or “what ROI benefits will a cloud-based solution bring?”

Your executive team will rely on you to explain the features and benefits of the cloud, as well as the expected return on investment. Check out our free guide below to learn how to make a case for the cloud and digital transformation with your leadership team. We cover common pain points and how to overcome them.