A hybrid approach could put your organization on cloud nine

Until recently, many organizations’ ‘cloud-first’ strategies in reality meant ‘cloud-only’ (and more specifically, public cloud). Indeed, it wasn’t really a strategy, rather more an aspiration.

However, fast forward to today and many organizations are realizing that public cloud providers can’t fully meet all their needs and priorities. In fact, most organizations will never be fully on the public cloud for a number of reasons:

1. Up to 50 percent of workloads will need to stay on-premises for a range of reasons including edge use cases, data gravity, latency, IP protection, sovereignty, performance and app entanglement.
2. Many companies continue to see security and data compliance as a barrier to public cloud adoption, as the NIS2 and DORA regulations intensify the spotlight on organizations.
3. Technically, a public cloud may not always deliver either, as latency and throughput issues can often arise when organizations are at the mercy of both their application architecture or their network connectivity.
4. Cloud migration skills are scarce and hence, costly, with 39 percent of CIOs saying this is stalling their cloud strategies, sometimes by two years or more.
5. And despite the expectations, because of the ease of consumption and often less than perfect governance, public cloud costs are out of control, with businesses globally wasting an average of 27 percent of public cloud spending.
6. Finally, unforeseen, and costly charges can occur in the event companies need to move or consume their data outside of the public cloud. A report last year showed that unbudgeted data egress costs added around $30 million a year to NASA’s $65m-per-year AWS bill.

Best of both worlds -- enter hybrid.

Although public cloud services undoubtedly have their place in the modern IT landscape, many organizations are rightly wary of putting all their eggs into one basket by relying on a public cloud-only approach, particularly when it comes to concentration of risk, data security and governance.

The balance of a well-constructed hybrid cloud can instead offer significant benefits to organizations, including agility and cost savings. This allows organizations to innovate, seize new opportunities and adopt efficiencies faster than their competitors, quickly turning IT infrastructure from a pure cost center into a vital driver of profit.

Some of the key benefits of a hybrid cloud model:

1. If an organization is reluctant -- or indeed, unable -- to entrust certain systems or data to the public cloud (like financial software, intellectual property or customers’ personal data), they can operate within an on-premise or privately hosted cloud platform while reserving the public cloud for more appropriate workloads such as B2C applications, application testing or data backup.
2. Organizations that experience higher workloads at key times of the year do not have to maintain peak capacity in an on-site data center or private cloud. With a hybrid cloud, vital or sensitive applications can run year-round in a private environment, then capacity can be added when needed from a public cloud to offload selected environments. When the rush period ends, organizations simply scale back to reduce costs.
3. Rather than investing to match peak capacity with more capital in expensive, physical on-site data infrastructure, organizations can instead expand their capacity as needed in the public portion of their hybrid cloud, enjoying valuable cost flexibility in the process.
4. When starting work on a new innovation, organizations may  want the initial plans to be developed and proved in the private section of their hybrid cloud. Later, when the project has moved on from the sensitive, IP-intensive research and development (R&D) stage and it’s time to validate at scale, organizations can do so using the near-unlimited capacity offered by the public cloud.
5. From individual customer transactions and sales figures to employee stats and more, organizations have never had access to so much data. A hybrid cloud model can help organizations develop and implement a suitable data strategy. Rationalizing this data, classifying, categorizing and ultimately analyzing it to derive actionable insights, will help drive operational efficiencies or seize new revenue opportunities.  
6. Fast-growing organizations often struggle to recruit and maintain the IT resource necessary to meet their objectives. A hybrid cloud strategy and selective use of MSP’s can extend internal capability at a known cost and allow internal IT who, after all, understand the business best, to focus on delivering value to the organization rather than keeping the lights on.
7. Finally, a hybrid cloud can help to protect a business against unforeseen circumstances, such as hardware or networking failure, or as is more common, a cyber incident that compromises one part of the estate. A hybrid cloud approach will help reduce the concentration of risk and allow restoration of key services to alternate facilities quickly and easily.

Hybrid cloud: starting smart.

Today’s evolving IT landscape requires organizations to be flexible, cost-effective, and scalable all at once. With multiple factors influencing cloud spend, organizations need a balanced solution that doesn’t just cut costs but improves business performance while maximizing value from data. In 2025, a hybrid cloud approach represents the best of both worlds and could be the strategy that makes organizations more competitive than ever.

Photo Credit: phloxii/Shutterstock

Andy Bevan is Head of Cloud and Digital Transformation at Daisy, part of the Wavenet group.