Over the last few years, we have seen a significant increase in adoption of cloud computing technology. These patterns demonstrate a great opportunity for innovation amongst businesses, especially those looking for more flexible and secure infrastructure solutions, which can be found in hybrid cloud solutions.
Analyst firm Gartner found that cloud computing ranks among the highest on its disruption scale and has become a $246.8 billion industry as of 2017. These services will only continue to grow in popularity and will act as a necessary enabler for future disruptions.
Although some businesses remain skeptical of cloud computing, the infrastructure has proven to enhance or replace all parts of a business’s IT environment while promoting improved efficiency, the opportunity for expansion, and greater flexibility.
Hybrid cloud solutions work by combining both public and private cloud infrastructures, providing greater flexibility for companies that are looking for hosting resources and as well as the ability to run classified applications privately while maintaining SaaS and IaaS on a public cloud.
Besides increased flexibility, there are a few other notable benefits of hybrid cloud solutions include:
1. Scale Easily and Efficiently
Scaling an IT infrastructure can be extremely expensive, making it out of reach for most small or newly-thriving businesses.
Hybrid cloud environments, though, allow businesses to scale in order to accommodate specific workloads. Businesses can implement automation rules in the cloud that ensure the ability to scale resources up and down as the demand changes for the business. This customization ensures an optimized environment that performs efficiently to take advantage of unlimited resources based on demand-driven usage.
2. Avoid Downtime — Even During Disasters
Keeping your business running at all times is crucial if you want your brand to succeed. Your data should still be accessible even during a disaster, and most businesses can’t afford any downtime. There’s more to this than simply backing up and replacing content on a cloud, though.
That’s why hybrid cloud solutions are often considered the key components in business continuity solutions. Hybrid clouds ensure critical data is replicated to a cloud in a different location, thus providing data insurance during any natural or technological disaster.
3. Increase Your Speed to Market
One of the primary reasons organizations choose to move to the cloud is to make it easier to expand their business into new regions, and hybrid cloud platforms provide the agility organizations need to quickly enter new markets at affordable costs.
Companies of all sizes are able to get a jump on global initiatives, as the cost of investment is greatly reduced through on-demand self-service. Cloud resources can be automated and spun up instantaneously to grow when needed without wasting any unnecessary resources. Thanks to the reductions in time and low costs of entry provided by hybrid cloud solutions, companies of all sizes can increase their competitive advantages.
4. Improve Security
Although security fears are decreasing as cloud usage grows, security measures remain a top priority and an ongoing challenge that needs to be managed properly in any organization.
A private hybrid cloud system ensures you have more control over the design and architecture of the system while providing a higher level of data security in comparison to public cloud solutions.
5. Gain a Competitive Advantage
When it comes to innovative technologies, hybrid cloud solutions offer far more opportunities than any other type of infrastructure, providing benefits in the forms of customer satisfaction, decreased costs and risks, higher revenue, and greatly expanding global market reach.
Adopting cloud solutions can give your organization a leg up on the competition, too — in fact, according to Cloud Industry Forum research, 56 percent of cloud users feel their organization has a competitive advantage that is a direct result of cloud services, while an additional 22 percent anticipate seeing one.
Without a doubt, there are several benefits hybrid cloud solutions provide to organizations. When it comes to complex IT infrastructure, there is rarely a one-size-fits-all solution. The great flexibility hybrid cloud solutions provide, however, will very likely meet your company’s needs while enhancing your business and solving even the most complex problems.
Learn more
Creating a Hybrid Cloud environment through Private Networking
Jeanine Cloud Rigby
March 13, 2018 at 2:04Businesses nowadays tend to switch to cloud computing because of several benefits that a business can get to it. I agree with all the benefits that you presented. It is a great advantage for a business to adopt cloud computing especially in today’s generation where most of the process is being automated. I personally think that companies that offer accounting services here in the Philippines should adopt this kind of technology. Nice article!