Is hybrid cloud the future of IT?
Many IT executives would argue that it is. In fact, a recent study by IDG Research Services found that strong adopters of hybrid cloud were outpacing businesses that were yet to embrace the technology. The same research outlined that hybrid cloud users were three times more likely to be approaching their digital business goals. They were also three times more likely to be nearing their infrastructure readiness goals than their non-adopter counterparts.
This makes boosting a business’ competitiveness one of the greatest benefits of the hybrid cloud.
In a recent interview with IBM, the VP of cloud services at technology sourcing and benchmarking firm, Clarify360, Jo Peterson, explained that businesses often approach her looking for advice around how to outdo their competitors. And more and more, her answer is hybrid cloud.
Consider how well a large retailer would fare if it took them months to update their online shopping portal or mobile app. It won’t be long before they’ve started shopping somewhere else. With hybrid cloud they have the agility, flexibility and time to revenue businesses need to attract, and keep, customers in a world being redefined by digital transformation.
While there is no denying that public and private clouds are the future, combining the two is what gives businesses a real competitive advantage.
The best of both worlds
Most businesses want certain applications to be hosted on different clouds for very specific reasons.
Hybrid cloud satisfies a diverse range of use cases and complex deployment scenarios by offering a combination of both private and public cloud deployment models that remain distinct but are bound together to provide a flexible computing platform within the same business.
This allows you to make strategic decisions around where to split your data and processing and choosing the best type of cloud for each job. For example, an organisation’s most sensitive data can be stored on the more secure and controlled private cloud; providing an extra layer of security.
How hybrid cloud aids digital transformation
If you look at any of the businesses that were once highly successful but have since fallen out of favour – Nokia, Blackberry, Kodak to name a few – they all failed to innovate at the same pace as their competitors. Once market disruptors, these businesses were disrupted by digital transformation.
According to The Enterprisers Project, a community of business and IT savvy CIOs, in companies that are succeeding with digital transformation, their transformation efforts and hybrid cloud strategy often intersect. The connection between transformation and hybrid cloud can be broken down into three different categories:
- Using digital to transform your business model: When a company sets out to reimagine or expand their business model they need to be able to test and build new concepts without having a negative impact on the business as a whole. Success in the digital world demands experimentation. hybrid cloud offers the agility and flexibility the business needs to run proof-of-concepts and trial new ideas.
- Using digital to transform your operating model: As businesses look for new ways to beat the competition, hybrid cloud enables them to automate business processes that may previously have been quite costly and time-consuming. Not only does this reduce expenses and boost overall efficiency, it also increases repeatability.
- Using digital to optimise a business function: Wish your IT team had more time to work on projects that benefit your bottom line? With hybrid cloud, organisations can pick and choose which business functions and workload they’d like to a service provider. In doing so, not only are they enjoying the benefits of high-intensity computing power on an ad-hoc or elastic basis but they’re also providing their IT staff with the opportunity to innovate.
There’s no denying that digital transformation is totally revolutionising how organisations use and rely on technology. And there’s no doubt that cloud will continue to be a part of this revolution for years to come. If you’re keen to take the next leap in the evolution of your enterprise IT, we’re here to help.
