Hybrid Cloud -  A New Content Divide Emerges

- Virender Jeet Sr. Vice President, Newgen Software

Cloud adoption has evolved immensely over the last few years, as organizations begin to realize its true potential. It has led to unprecedented growth across industries by fostering a collaborative ecosystem and a gamut of innovative business services. Once considered as a cost effective platform to support the new business initiatives, Cloud has moved to the centre stage now. It is the lynchpin around which many of the strategic decisions about the core IT infrastructure are taken.

It is this shift that is making business leaders rethink their cloud strategy. The goal is to fully leverage the on-demand, self-service, elasticity and cost efficiency attributes of cloud while maintaining a secure, reliable and high performance framework. This leaves them with a tough choice between a private and public cloud environment.

A private cloud renders a proprietary and highly customized data storage and management architecture that allows organizations to score high on information security, confidentiality as well as regulatory compliance. However, it carries the same staffing, management, maintenance and capital expenses issues that are common to the traditional, on premise data centres. Additionally, private cloud expenses include spends on virtualization, cloud software and cloud management tools.

Virender Jeet Sr. Vice President, Newgen Software

“While specific aspects of the existing infrastructure (such as storage and compute) can occur in the private cloud, the remainder (such as analytical processing of data) can be moved to the public cloud. This will ensure that organizations are in complete control of its business sensitive information while taking full advantage of the advancements in data analytics.”

On the other hand, a public cloud delivers the much needed scalability, flexibility and cost advantage along with the ability to change computing resources on-demand and provision multiple machines for complex computing jobs such as the big data analytics. Customized tools track computing usage and business units pay only for the resources they use. However, these shared computing environments aren’t suitable for all businesses, such as those with mission-critical workloads, security concerns, uptime requirements or management demands.

Hybrid Cloud Computing has helped organizations address the security concerns of cloud platform without compromising on its business benefits. It ensures a diversified IT environment where both public/offsite and private/onsite cloud resources can be deployed depending on the business needs. A perfect example of a Hybrid Cloud environment can be seen in cases where an application runs in a private cloud or data centre and bursts into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes - a capability called cloud bursting.

A New Content Divide Emerges

It is therefore clear that any enterprise would do well to inculcate both public and private features in its cloud strategy. This journey to the hybrid cloud would however depend on the nature of the business, the industry, the competition and other market forces, changing consumer attitudes and demographics, the legal and regulatory environment as well as the overall business strategy and future roadmap.

But what it definitely entails is the emergence of a new content divide within an enterprise. With a hybrid cloud environment, organizations will look to manage the sensitive and highly regulated information within the controlled environment of a private cloud, while willingly storing the transactional, non-critical content in a shared hosting facility.

Broadly speaking, private cloud will be deployed to create and manage the most confidential data and information of an organization, be it for any process or department. On the other hand, public cloud will be used for the more voluminous, mundane and working levels of data and information management where the real advantage lies in seamless accessibility and faster processing.

Also, there will be a change in the data management strategy of an enterprise. While specific aspects of the existing infrastructure (such as storage and compute) can occur in the private cloud, the remainder (such as analytical processing of data) can be moved to the public cloud. This will ensure that organizations are in complete control of its business sensitive information while taking full advantage of the advancements in data analytics.

Building the Right Strategy

It is important to understand the strengths as well as the limitations of your cloud system, more specifically the interoperability and integration aspects. Your existing IT infrastructure and systems stand to influence your decision a lot. You have to ensure that the legacy systems such as ERPs, CRMs, Data Warehouses, Data Centres and the automation systems such as BPM, ECM, Social, Mobile and E-mail plug-ins integrate and interact synchronously with the hybrid cloud set-up.

As the hybrid cloud emerges as a full-fledged IT strategy, a trusted vendor support, consultation, as well as the ability to anticipate the near future development pertaining to your business and industry would go a long way in determining the efficacy of your hybrid cloud.