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Enterprises Prefer the Hybrid Way

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Cloud computing is no longer in its nascent stage. It has gone beyond boardroom discussions and is now seeing real adoption. As cloud solutions continue to mature and seep into large enterprises, we are starting to see the real power of cloud adoption. Companies are no longer content with relying on the cloud for non-mission critical functional requirements. Many enterprises are now taking a strategic and multifaceted view of cloud offerings. They are betting big, not only on internal systems but also on customer and partner enablement-even in highly critical areas such as financials, supply chain, and manufacturing. We have also seen an upward swing in adoption of Customer Experience (CRM) and Human Capital Management (HR) in the past few years.

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Not surprisingly, the need to drive down costs in today's tough economy is a major incentive for CFOs to explore cloud computing. Recent research confirms that companies that have ventured into the Cloud have been able to cut costs as a result. The savings are primarily derived from the subscription model, the ability to consolidate onto a single platform from disparate systems and through process standardization.

Why organisations prefer the hybrid cloud

In terms of deployment models, there is an ongoing battle between Public and Private Cloud environments and a large number of enterprises are choosing the Hybrid model. This is because organizations across enterprises are now faced with a situation where their private cloud infrastructure is unable to support a lot of services. Therefore, even the cloud strategies of companies across industries are undergoing radical transformation. Analysts and experts expect cloud computing to become the bulk of new IT spend and as per research firm Gartner, 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

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In India, the industry has seen a skew towards private cloud. However, perceptions are changing and early concerns about the security and confidentiality of data are abating. Public cloud is something that is potentially off premises, managed by somebody else, owned by somebody else, and offered as a service. Private cloud is for those seeking the same dynamic flexibility, provisioning, and so on, but for a specific reason, usually security, do not want to put that into a public service. A private cloud could be purely managed by an enterprise or the enterprise could have some support for managing it as a dedicated private cloud.

Hybrid cloud on the other hand is about mixing the two. There are many different types or models of hybrid cloud. One involves functional distribution, putting different things in different places, perhaps having development in a private cloud and having production in a public cloud. Going forward, most cloud implementations are going to involve some kind of a hybrid approach where enterprise private clouds are integrated with either other private clouds or public clouds. The challenge with this approach is that with an assorted environment, the technology users are required to sign on to multiple systems. Data integration challenges may also increase as more cloud apps are implemented.

With increasing interest in Hybrid, a new architecture is emerging. In addition to focusing on consolidation and optimization of resources at the IT level, the new architecture will support hybrid models, and is more about collaboration across multiple models of cloud. It helps enterprises to stay mobile in the cloud for a host of mobile applications, social applications, and then finally of the cloud becoming the hub for analytics as well. These changes are real and are beginning to see the light of day, in terms of collaboration, in terms of mobility, in terms of social and analytics.

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