The Rise of Hybrid Cloud: Redefining the Business Functions

– Girish Gupta, Director- Technical Services, India Subcontinent Citrix

Cloud storage adoption has seen tremendous growth over the past few years and has become a fundamental requirement for IT decision makers and companies small or big. It is redefining how a business functions and as per IDC predictions, will continue to do so all the way to 2020. Historically, many companies have been apprehensive to shift to a cloud based model given the security concerns associated with traditional dependency on a single vendor. Fortunately, there is a new model that is gaining prominence amongst companies—Hybrid Cloud.

Hybrid Cloud uses a combination of an organizations on-premise private cloud and public cloud services. This allows both infrastructures to operate independently of each other, at the same time offering benefits of multiple deployment models.

Considered as the best of both worlds in computing, Hybrid Cloud is an environment where a private cloud is assembled to handle the standard workload, with burst compute offloaded to the public cloud. This translates to a long-term budget-friendly arrangement as opposed to traditional modes.

This technology is making headway across various sectors and industries of all sizes. Hybrid cloud is being deployed in the healthcare sector, as it simplifies the data exchange process between healthcare providers and insurance companies. Similarly, the financial sector is also largely dependent on hybrid for pushing trade orders and running analytics on trades. Law firms and retail firms also use the hybrid cloud model for reasons including safeguarding information against the potential loss due to theft, hardware failure etc.

Why going Hybrid is beneficial?

Cost Benefits: With the adoption of Hybrid cloud, businesses can reduce their overall cost of ownership and improve cost efficiency. Since a hybrid cloud uses both private and public, it allows users to enjoy significant economies of scale without exposing imperative data to third-party vulnerabilities. By using this model, businesses have to pay for the extra compute time only when these resources are needed and not on a constant basis.

Security: The hybrid cloud model helps address security and compliance issues. By using this model, businesses are able to maintain in-house storage for sensitive operations. In fact, many of them are of the view that the data stored in the cloud could actually prove to be more secure than that on a server. Organizations have the option to carry our critical operations on their private cloud, while using the public cloud to carry out heavy processing tasks.

Direct accessibility through on-premise infrastructure: A hybrid cloud model provides direct accessibility due to on-premise private infrastructure and is not pushed through the public internet. As compared to public cloud services, this model considerably reduces latency, access time and provides contingency against internet failure. The on-ground computational infrastructure supports the average business workload while providing the option to leverage the public in case the workload exceeds the computational power of the private cloud component.

Still not convinced? Enter, Hybrid Cloud management

While many organizations are shifting to due to its various benefits, many are still apprehensive because of perceived privacy issues associated with it. To address this, hybrid cloud solution providers are offering cloud-based management platforms that radically accelerates how IT can securely deliver the apps and data people need to do their jobs, while simplifying the process of managing workspace resources. Such platforms are being created for businesses that face incredible pressure from the explosion of native mobile apps, cloud-based web applications, and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives that are straining conventional IT infrastructure to its breaking point. Additionally, these companies are offering a comprehensive portfolio of workspace services available as a subscription.

Conclusion

More and more companies that are looking for smarter ways to optimize their IT spending are considering hybrid cloud as a game changer presenting businesses with a wealth of opportunities. Gradually, businesses are moving towards more adaptive technologies like cloud computing to deliver a host of services with agility, in a secure and cost effective manner. IT decision makers have bypassed the questions raised regarding moving workloads to cloud and observed that the hybrid cloud is capable of providing the same and sometimes even better security for sensitive data and applications.

Hybrid cloud brings tremendous value to an organization- so much so that leading providers of hybrid cloud technologies have geared up and acquired the expertise to ensure that aspects like security are in place to safeguard the information on cloud. Adopting hybrid cloud can free a company’s valuable IT resources, make IT budgets available for innovation in business and make data available all the time. So when are you shifting to hybrid cloud?