How To Scale Your Business With Hybrid Cloud Deployments

The challenge of scaling your business is always a great one and seldom leaves any of your company’s departments untouched. While this is not outwardly apparent, this defines the extent of success, impacting your company’s overall future market position and financial health.

The cloud-first world

According to RightScale report, 95 percent businesses are already using or experimenting with cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Gartner reports that by 2021 more than half the organisations using cloud will not just have a few workloads in the cloud, they will be all in. This means that companies will be refactoring and re-building directly in the cloud. There is no going back to on-prem.

Agility through hybrid cloud

Enterprises expect business agility, on-demand scalability, innovation, reduced total cost of ownership with improved security. While public cloud seemingly addresses these requirements, the lack of in-house cloud experts, managing multiple vendors, expensive platforms, and the complexity and constant evolution of public clouds are some of the key challenges. Hybrid cloud provides the scalability most businesses seek by integrating public cloud resources with an organization’s existing infrastructure, so they can provide new capabilities to their end users while reducing costs even more. Essentially, hybrid cloud solutions give organizations unlimited resources on-demand while maximizing existing infrastructure investments. Businesses like the flexibility behind the model, and it is for this reason that hybrid cloud adoptions continue to rise.

Adopting a hybrid cloud model does not necessarily free you from the challenges of the public cloud. If you manage your hybrid cloud yourself, you will likely find the same challenges with talent acquisition, or managing the infrastructure and applications (perhaps more so), as with a pure public cloud approach. Even cost management may not fully be solved if you do not know where to place your workloads. Therefore, it is critical to work with your cloud service provider to architect a customised solution that addresses the scalability and growth your business needs factoring in your current infrastructure.

The CIO’s best friend

Among the many successful use cases, enterprises are increasingly using the cloud as their disaster recovery location or leveraging cloud for SAP by reliably running critical yet suitable instances of SAP workloads on cloud. Amidst such complex deployments, the right cloud management partner could end up becoming the CIO’s best friend. If you tap into your partner’s expertise in cloud architecture and management, you and your IT team can instead focus on working closely with your businesses on other projects to drive revenue growth. A managed cloud services provider is also able to handle your hybrid platform , or work together with you to make sure you are getting maximum mileage from your systems. It is easy for a new cloud project to get derailed because of spiraling costs. A managed hybrid cloud provider can help you keep track of yourcosts – which is the topmost challenge for mature cloud users, according to RightScale. A managed provider will also monitor your environment and alert you to any sudden increases in your cloud spend, freeing you from the hassle of trying to figure out which cloud is getting what percentage of your budget.

Harnessing IT for growth

There is a long way between developing a cloud strategy and successfully executing it, and there are often many roadblocks ahead. The risks posed by cyber threats and potential data leaks are a critical concern, forcing CIOs to re-look at their IT set-up to ensure that critical IP and customer data are protected. Yet, at the same time, they are under growing pressure to create efficiencies and harness IT for business growth through digital transformation. This is a balancing act where the scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of hybrid cloud, as well as the right partner, will make a huge difference.