Hybrid cloud is progressively becoming a major differentiator in today’s fast-moving technology landscape and offers IT decision-makers a more affordable way to grow and innovate. When you couple storage and hybrid cloud, you can get the “best of both worlds” by combining on premise storage with cloud storage to deliver a very cost effective, high performing, flexible and scalable solution.
We are seeing increased adoption of a "cloud also" strategy that explicitly endorses hybrid cloud architectures where cloud sourcing decisions are driven by workload requirements as identified and evaluated jointly across relevant business and IT teams.
The top four reasons for adopting a hybrid cloud strategy are:
1) Increased Productivity
2) Improved Security and Risk Reduction
3) Cost Reduction
4) Scalability to Handle Dynamic Workloads
Organizations hope to offload some of their IT resource and management complexity to the cloud to increase productivity. A close second reason to use hybrid cloud is to improve security and reduce risk by using the flexibility of a hybrid platform to judiciously choose which workloads and data to move to the cloud and which to maintain in-house. Rounding out the top four motivations are cost reduction by shifting costs from fixed IT to as-needed cloud services—and scalability to handle dynamic workloads.
The most common use for cloud storage today is for off-site backup and archiving. This is a relatively inexpensive way to help protect against technology and site failures. These applications are also less sensitive to latency and bandwidth limitations, especially if backup can be done from a snapshot. Also, when using a public cloud alongside a private cloud, it is about as hybrid as using disk for your primary data and tape for the backup. While the two are not integrated, they perform separate roles in your overall IT infrastructure.
There are many ways to design and deploy hybrid cloud storage. Solution providers that have the expertise in architecting and successfully implementing these solutions are worth the investment.
If you need to discuss your data storage challenges, we have a wealth of experience in this area and can guide you to the best strategy for your business.
For more information on hybrid cloud solutions, download a copy of IBM's August 2016 white paper:
A bridge to Hybrid Cloud.
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Roger Osmond, President
Sentia