For companies that want to modernize their operations and use data more efficiently and securely, hybrid cloud is a great option. However, for your organization to advance in its digital transformation journey, you need to do more than just adopt hybrid cloud. You must develop a hybrid cloud strategy.
Executive SAP Solution Architect Bob Gagnon emphasizes the importance of a hybrid cloud strategy, stating, “What strategy is emerging? Well, the hybrid strategy is gaining a great position: a strategy where a customer virtualizes on-premises for production workloads and leverages public cloud for other workloads. This strategy allows control of, and perimeter hardening of, the data.”
A hybrid cloud strategy will ensure that hybrid cloud resources align with your business goals and meet technology challenges. Developing a hybrid cloud strategy has many advantages, including increased flexibility, control, data protection, and data management.
Hybrid Cloud brings Flexibility and Agility
Hybrid cloud is valued for its flexibility because it provides both on-premises and public cloud resources. Virtualized on-site resources can be used for more sensitive data and production workloads, while public cloud resources can be used for customer-facing applications, archiving, and setting up development and testing environments. Both private and public cloud can be scaled up and down to meet changing capacity and workload demands.
A hybrid cloud strategy has the advantage of a unified platform that provides orchestration across private, public, and edge environments. Orchestration gives your company greater control over its cloud resources through single pane of glass management.
Data Protection & Disaster Recovery
Orchestration enhances hybrid cloud’s combination of on and off-premises resources by enabling efficient and reliable backup and disaster recovery functionality. On-site data can be synchronized with backups in the cloud for tighter recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Instant failover can be achieved in the public cloud for the purposes of disaster recovery.
When your company develops a hybrid cloud strategy that includes backup and disaster recovery, you can rest assured that your mission-critical and personally identifiable customer data will be safe from loss or compromise. Being strategic about where your data is stored in the hybrid cloud will strengthen your data protection efforts, as will using encryption.
Data Management & Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Companies can make data management part of their hybrid cloud strategy by using private and public cloud to tier data storage. Public cloud resources are ideal for storing less sensitive and frequently accessed data or for archiving data for the purposes of compliance audits. Private cloud provides the right environment for storing sensitive data, which requires strict access controls.
Data management is the key to organizing data so value can be extracted from it, meaning that data management should be part of any hybrid cloud strategy. Automating data management processes will ensure that data is moved to the correct type of storage so it can be accessed for use in advanced analytics, which produce the insights needed for optimal decision making.
How to Develop a Hybrid Cloud Strategy
When designing a hybrid cloud strategy, your company doesn’t need to go it alone. Finding the right technology partner will help you navigate those next steps in your cloud journey. Working with a cloud provider that is platform agnostic will ensure you find the ideal public cloud option to complement your private cloud resources.
Clear Technologies partners with leading cloud solutions IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure to deliver flexibility and scalability to our clients. We also offer Clear Managed Services to help you optimize your hybrid cloud resources without monopolizing your IT staff, as well as connectivity solutions to support your cloud assets. Our cloud experts will help your company get the most value out of your cloud investment.
Get on the road to a winning hybrid cloud strategy. Request a cloud consultation from Clear Tech.