Why Hybrid Cloud Adoption is Essential for Modernizing Business Operations
As the demand for business agility, operational speed, and disaster readiness is increasing rapidly, more organizations are deliberating hybrid cloud adoption. It has become a prominent choice for CIOs and CTOs to modernize their IT infrastructure. By leveraging this cloud adoption method, businesses can reap benefits such as improved operational flexibility, reduced expenditure, and reinforced security measures.
A recent study by IBM reinforced this with 85% of Indian respondents reporting using a hybrid cloud approach.
This blog will explain the benefits and best practices for companies to adopt a hybrid cloud successfully.
What is Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that combines on-premises infrastructure with the private and public cloud to enable businesses to leverage both benefits. Using this approach companies could get more flexibility, lower costs, and bolster security.
Why Modernizing Business Operations is Essential?
Changing Business Landscape:The business landscape is advancing with new technologies, competitors, and customer expectations. Therefore, modernizing business operations helps them to stay ahead of the competition.
Competition from New Start-Ups: Start-ups and disruptors are challenging established businesses in every industry, and many are leveraging the latest technologies to gain a competitive advantage. Modernizing helps companies compete with these new players and innovate faster.
Need for Agility and Scalability: Businesses must be able to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands and scale their operations up or down as needed. Modernizing business operations with hybrid cloud solutions provides the agility and scalability required to meet these challenges.
Cost Savings and Operational Efficiency: Traditional on-premises infrastructure can be expensive and complex to manage, requiring significant upfront capital investment and ongoing maintenance costs. Hybrid cloud solutions can help reduce these costs and improve operational efficiency by leveraging cloud services and automation.
Business Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Adoption:
- High Flexibility and Scalability
- Effective Backup and Disaster Recovery.
- Faster Deployment
- Lower Costs
- Enhanced Data Security and Compliance
Best Practices for Hybrid Cloud Adoption
Below is the list of best practices organizations can leverage while designing and managing a hybrid cloud strategy for their business.
Assess Your Current Workloads
Before adopting a hybrid cloud solution, it is essential to identify which applications and data are best suited for the cloud and which should remain on-premises. Also what they do, how end users will interact with them, how they manage data, how they network, and more.
Below questions to ask yourself, before jumping on the hybrid cloud strategy
- Who will own the work assignment?
- How essential are those assignments?
- Who gets the call if something goes wrong?
- When and where do the work assignments run?
- In public, private, or both kinds of cloud alternatives?
Understand Security and Governance
Any organization should prioritizeĀ cloud security, especially when operating a hybrid cloud infrastructure. It is critical for a hybrid cloud manager to adopt a proactive approach to system security by employing resources like Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems to regulate access to cloud data.
The two key areas to consider are:
System Security and Its Effect on Performance: Data encryption is a common way of protecting sensitive information, but it can sometimes lower the overall performance of the cloud system. As a result, it is imperative to be ready to handle any performance-related problems that may surface when monitoring.
Policy Management and Enforcement: Hybrid cloud managers must be well-informed about the written policies governing the cloud system to ensure that they are adhered to it and do not interfere with operations.
Leverage Automation
Prioritize automation of critical processes such as resource provisioning and performance monitoring inĀ hybrid cloud management. It enables the core workforce to focus on essential activities like application development and legacy software improvement, relieves concerns about underlying system operations, allowing focus on high-priority tasks.
Choose the Right Cloud Provider
Think about aspects like security, scalability, performance, and affordability when selecting a cloud service provider, and who can meet your specific needs, and requirements and have a plan in place for migrating data and applications to the cloud.
Invest In Hybrid Cloud Management Tools
Hybrid cloud management tools can aid in managing and monitoring cloud costs and delivering consistent user experiences, regardless of where the workload runs. Employing these tools can effectively simplify and streamline operations.
Five Industries That Could Benefit Immediately From Adopting Hybrid Cloud Technology
1. Government
Hybrid cloud has emerged as an effective solution for government agencies looking to streamline their IT infrastructure while maintaining control over sensitive data. By leveraging the benefits of both public and private clouds, a hybrid cloud allows government agencies to leverage the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud for non-sensitive workloads while keeping sensitive data on-premises in a private cloud.
2. Education
Hybrid cloud in the education industry can provide numerous benefits to educational institutions, teachers, and students alike. By combining the scalability and cost-effectiveness of public clouds with the security and control of private clouds, hybrid cloud can help educational institutions to improve their IT infrastructure and streamline their operations.
Hybrid cloud provides more opportunities for collaboration. It allows teachers, students, and administrators to access and share data and applications in the public cloud. This enables teachers and students to work together on projects, assignments, and research more efficiently.
3. Healthcare
TheĀ healthcare sectorĀ is dealing with a number of serious IT issues, including the need for improved security against hackers attempting to access private patient information. Furthermore, in order to protect sensitive patient data, healthcare organisations must comply with ever-stricter privacy laws.
With remote diagnostics, patient monitoring, and real-time collaboration amongst medical professionals now becoming a digital reality, being able to communicate data freely is also of utmost importance.
A hybrid cloud infrastructure’s combination of public and private cloud resources offers the healthcare industry the safeguards it needs to protect patient data, adhere to compliance rules, and freely transfer data between stakeholders.
4. Finance
The financial services industry can greatly benefit from hybrid cloud architecture in many ways because of its strength, adaptability, connectedness, and scalability.
Financial organizations can dramatically expand their current infrastructure at no major additional cost by using public cloud resources. To meet regulatory standards, all of this can be done while retaining the sensitive data on-premise.
A hybrid cloud can help with disaster recovery by enabling important data to be continuously and safely backed up in on-premises data centres.
5. Retail
Retailers are having more benefits compared to any other sector. They can ensure optimal customer experiences using latest applications.
A hybrid cloud helps retailers meet consumer demand for personalization, while also ensuring data security and consistent across all the channels. It provides robust data analysis to design products that their customers want during high traffic periods.
Additionally, it gives retailers better real-time access to their inventory, which can boost sales and relieve cash flow issues.
Elevate Your Business Operations with Locuz’s Hybrid Cloud Solutions
To make an informed decision about adopting a hybrid cloud model, it’s essential to understand how it will impact your business. This shift to cloud computing is more than just a technological upgrade; it is a shift in mind set that impacts the entire organization, including technology, processes, personnel, and expertise.
Wherever you are on your journey to hybrid cloud, Locuz is ready to help. Locuz has been key in designing and architecting solutions for achieving Hybrid IT by developing certified and tested IPs such asĀ ClouTor. We have worked with organizations spanned across various sectors including Hi-Tech, Life sciences, Healthcare, Financial Services, Insurance, Engineering Design, Education & Research. This has led to a better Engineering understanding of the platform and acquiring skills to architect both on-premises and cloud solutions.
Contact us for a seamless and prompt transition to a hybrid cloud without any disruptions to your business.