Advertisment

How Hybrid Clouds Play a Key Role in Transforming SMEs

IT investments are expected to grow in the cloud continuously, boosted by increased spending on its top line use of data backup and archive.

author-image
Ashok Pandey
New Update
hybrid cloud

Rajesh Khurana - Country Manager for India & SAARC, Seagate Technology Rajesh Khurana - Country Manager for India & SAARC, Seagate Technology

Advertisment

The Indian economy is witnessing a steady growth and forming its backbone is the rapidly growing SME segment in the country. India is the hub for e-commerce and mobile applications. This is driving the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which in turn is contributing to newer job opportunities and widening GDP contribution.

Technology is overtaking traditional business formats. Digital business transformation is generating new prospects across every industry. In this increasingly competitive scenario, accelerating business growth is a priority. SMEs are just like any business. Data is their lifeblood. So it makes sense that one of the top priorities for business owners is finding the best way to backup and store their data. Especially for the SMEs, it becomes essential to adopt solutions that are easy-to-manage, ensures protected backups so as to make it easier to focus on key tasks for business amplification. Many organizations are looking for ways to drive more business value, redefine their business models, and build an enhanced customer experience in an increasingly digital world. Many skeptical small business owners are still finding it overwhelming to deploy technology for increasing the efficiency of their operations.

SMEs need awareness about hybrid clouds

Advertisment

Education plays a key role here. It becomes pivotal to educate SMBs about the importance and necessity of a viable storage solution to augment business needs. In this process, Cloud computing is becoming evidently important for storing the vast backend data that powers the businesses of an organization.

IT investments are expected to grow in the cloud continuously, boosted by increased spending on its top line use of data backup and archive. As organizations attempt to strike a balance between having all computational services on premises, time to the cloud and offloading storage, a logical solution has developed: the hybrid cloud.

Businesses have started to understand that their approach to cloud must be through a combination of cloud services. Organizations using hybrid cloud define it as a cloud spread across multiple deployment models. Most of them see it as a combination of Private and Public Cloud usage. As the term hybrid suggest, it broadly means a cloud computing environment which uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms.

Advertisment

Why hybrid clouds suit SMEs more

Public Cloud usually becomes the first choice of cloud services for businesses as there are some clear advantages like accessibility, cost efficiency, scalable infrastructure without additional cost and lower IT staff requirements. But security, reliability, and regulatory compliance remain the principal concerns with public clouds. Hybrid clouds are commonly deployed in the organizations, particularly when proximity is imperative and physical space is at not readily available.

The effectiveness of a hybrid methodology is, therefore, fairly obvious where, some data and workloads simply need to reside onsite. But when physical accessibility isn’t a concern, one should have the ability to extend into the public cloud.

Advertisment

The hybrid cloud concept is designed for use by a single organization. The public and private cloud infrastructures, which operate independently of each other, communicate over an encoded linkage, using technology that allows for the transferability of data and applications.

The public and private clouds in a hybrid cloud procedure are separate and independent features. This allows organizations to store protected or privileged data on a private cloud while retaining the ability to leverage computational resources from the public cloud to run applications that rely on this data. This keeps data disclosure to a comparatively minimum risk because they're not storing delicate data long-term on the public cloud module.

Using a hybrid cloud can greatly enable connectivity in the workplace. For managing records, companies must integrate various business processes, such as internal messaging, scheduling, business intelligence and analytics, and other CRM systems. Public cloud offerings alone do not readily assimilate with on-premises hardware. Devices such as printers, scanners, fax machines, and physical security hardware, like security cameras, fire, and CO₂ detectors, can be hindrances to public cloud adoption. Hence, instead of isolating these mission-critical devices from the rest of the organization's network, implementing a private cloud component would be far more efficient.

Advertisment

Hybrid cloud model empowers IT decision makers with greater control over both the private and public components than using a prepackaged public cloud platform, especially for enterprise content management. This prepackaged software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions face frequent reshapes and edits without prior notice, if not written properly, can break compatibility with pre-existing content.

Hybrid cloud allows the businesses to leverage the capabilities of public cloud platform providers without offloading the totality of their data to a third-party data center. This provides a great deal of flexibility in figuring tasks while keeping the most dynamic components within the company vicinity.

Although the realistic cost of server hardware for the private component of the hybrid cloud is high, the control that IT departments can exercise over hardware selection and system design for the private component offers an irreplaceable way of properly modifying resources to the requirements of the organization. Accumulating a private cloud to handle a standard workload, with erupting compute offloaded to the public cloud, can be a long-term budget-friendly arrangement.

Today the SMBs are faced with explosive data growth, compliance requirements, the cost and complexity of non-traditional applications like the Internet of Things, big data and the ongoing transition to software-as-a-service. At the same time, IT budgets are not increasing, security threats continue to put organizations at risk and data center operations are taking more time away from the core business. With hybrid cloud, today all the challenges can be addressed through new performance, scale, availability and management solutions, which drive out operational complexity and give customers and partners’ time back to run their core business.

hybrid-cloud
Advertisment