11 Key Considerations For Hybrid Cloud Adoption: Why 90% of CIOs Choose This?

Intro to hybrid cloud architecture

A hybrid cloud refers to a computing environment that combines public, private, and on-premises models by allowing data and applications to be shared among them. Every business has critical and non-critical data or applications. The Hybrid cloud model allows enterprises to deploy critical applications on-premises and host less critical applications on the third-party, public cloud. With this hybrid approach, every business can unlock the full potential of cloud infrastructure to meet evolving needs.

Here are some benefits of the Hybrid Cloud Model (HCM):

1. Meeting scalability requirements. 
2. Ensure seamless data transfer and operations.
3. Flexibility and agility. 
4. HCM provides access to modern technologies like AI and ML without having to extend or replace the existing infrastructure. 
5. You can increase productivity and speed up the development & delivery of apps.

Benefits of adopting hybrid cloud architecture

Hybrid cloud architecture offers manifold benefits for businesses in terms of flexibility, security, high availability, time, and budgets. Let’s look at the benefits of adopting hybrid cloud solutions.

1. Business acceleration:

In the current technology-dominated era, being innovative is inevitable. By adopting hybrid cloud solutions, you can speed up business processes, support collaborations, and deliver cost-effective solutions.

2. Cost reduction:

Compared to public and private cloud solutions, hybrid cloud computing solutions are cost-effective and help improve productivity, performance, and business agility.

3. High availability:

In the hybrid cloud model, one public cloud could be used as a backup cloud to navigate a few unforeseen disruptions and downtimes.

4. Risk mitigation:

As you use both on-premise and public cloud models, you can have total control over critical data. This further helps in mitigating cybersecurity-related challenges.

5. Scalability:

This is one of the greatest benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud strategy. You can scale your business to the greatest extent while keeping the core business data on-premises.

key considerations for hybrid cloud solutions adoption:

Hybrid cloud solutions help organizations scale their business while securing critical data. Here are the 11 key considerations for adopting hybrid cloud computing solutions for SMBs.

1. Visibility of current state:

Before adopting hybrid cloud architecture, assess the current application landscape and infrastructure across the organization to save budget and time. This will help you eliminate unnecessary migrations to the cloud.

2. Rate of cloud adoption:

Generally, we have a phase-wise and big bang approach in adopting cloud solutions. The rate of adoption depends on the criticality of applications, data requirements, regulatory and compliance needs, modernization prerequisites, cost implications, and real-time requirements.

3. Application migration:

Before cloud migration, it’s imperative to find applications that need to remain on-premises and move to the cloud. Applications can be migrated “To and from” the data center and cloud using a hybrid cloud model. Hybrid cloud solution adoption can be temporary or permanent based on the cloud migration strategy of your organization.

4. Nature of applications:

Generally, we have two kinds of applications in an organization.

• Applications that change frequently and need user access.
• Applications that handle sensitive customer information.

This means you have to classify applications before adopting hybrid cloud solutions. Applications that handle critical information will remain on-premises, and applications that need continuous upgrades will be either on the public or private cloud.

5. Portfolio rationalization:

Every organization has different functionalities and applications catering to meet their business needs. To successfully adopt hybrid cloud computing, you must identify the redundant functionalities across applications and rationalize them before moving on to the hybrid cloud.

6. Selection of environment:

Selection of the cloud environment is crucial to move your business operations. As a CIO, your role is inevitable in choosing between public and private cloud models.

7. Integrations strategy:

Though you move part of your applications to the cloud, you still rely on on-premises applications for historical data. Therefore, it is imperative to have a seamless integration strategy between on-premise and cloud applications to collect and process both structured and unstructured data.

8. Cloud interoperability:

As you need or use multiple cloud services for your business, it is necessary to have cloud interoperability to make hybrid cloud adoption successful.

9. Regulatory requirements:

Applications requiring regulatory and compliance requirements demand that some applications reside on-premises. This requires an expert team to handle hybrid cloud migration operations and the right hosting option for applications.

10. Containerization:

Application containerization would help you make applications cloud-agnostic and move across public, private, and on-premises clouds. Microservices and containerization will make the enterprise more flexible and hybrid cloud solutions adoption successful.

Conclusion:

The recent past has been a time of turmoil for businesses everywhere, and IT teams of SMB organizations are under immense pressure to expand operations while minimizing investments and maintenance costs.

Hybrid cloud solutions hold tremendous promise for enabling business viability and even scalability, and are going to be under active consideration and evaluation at every CxO discussion..