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What is a hybrid cloud?
In 2024, it was found that human error contributed to nearly 95% of data breaches. This makes establishing a strong digital trust non-negotiable. Broadly, digital trust rests on five key pillars: privacy, transparency, reliability, security, and governance. With the increasing sophistication of AI-driven attacks, tightening cybersecurity measures is crucial for a robust IT infrastructure.In simple terms, a hybrid cloud is a storage and computing infrastructure that combines the best of both private (on-prem) and public cloud. It is an essential aspect for strengthening and securing IT infrastructure, as it helps in protecting critical data while running large workloads. The traditional IT infrastructure depended on centralised computing that included on-premises data center, servers, applications, and networking. However, increased digitalization and a global workforce led to the requirement for more computing power and physical space. This reduced scalability and put stress on operations, often mounting organisational costs.
With the rise in enterprises and their critical IT infrastructure, organisations have moved to a hybrid cloud in cloud computing. This enabled organisations to outsource storage on public clouds and optimize costs. Also, public clouds operate on subscription and pay-per-use models, ensuring limited waste of resources. With hybrid cloud solutions, organisations keep sensitive workloads on-prem while moving the rest to public.
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud for Large Enterprises
Operational Scalability
With hybrid cloud, enterprises get better agility as businesses can adapt to changes faster, ensure scalability in operations, and drive business growth. With a managed cloud environment, enterprises can get cloud storage as per their requirements and store growing IT data. It offers flexibility in terms of automated resource scaling. It can accommodate fluctuating volumes of data in real-time and ensure a seamless workflow.
Cost optimization
One of the biggest benefits of hybrid cloud is affordability. It helps businesses optimise spending, lower the cost of cloud management, and overall maintenance of expensive data centers. The DevOps team can allocate data across public and private clouds, depending on the sensitivity of the information.
Flexible licensing and subscription
Migration from a complete on-prem to a hybrid architecture comes with flexible and affordable licensing. With a subscription and pay-per-use model, businesses can pay according to their requirements. This keeps a check on unnecessary spending and accordingly upgrades or downgrades the plans.
Advanced security
Migration of the data and workloads across the hybrid cloud is encrypted and offers advanced security. With hybrid solutions protected with end-to-end security, it prevents the data from breaches. Public cloud providers have trained and skilled professionals monitoring the updates and IT data on the cloud 24/7, adding a layer of security. Whether it is managed cloud services or AI-powered monitoring, the systems keep up with the latest threats and offer real-time reports.
Increased control
The deployment of hybrid cloud solutions by enterprises equips them with better control and flexibility in terms of data and resource allocation. For example, a business can opt for private and on-prem cloud for sensitive data like intellectual property, medical records, personal identifiers, etc. However, for the rest of the workload, it can be migrated to the public cloud for better management of resource-intensive tasks. This reduces the cost of full-time monitoring of on-prem cloud as well as building a new data center for storage.
Regulatory compliance
It is crucial for enterprises to safeguard data and store the same while adhering to regulatory compliance. With the hybrid cloud model, it is convenient for businesses to comply with regulations across different geographies. It helps large enterprises to meet compliance standards that are internationally accepted. It adheres to standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and more.
Faster AI readiness
With the world leaning towards AI, hybrid cloud helps in leveraging the best of AI power. Cloud solution providers are integrating AI at scale, enabling the transformation of large businesses. This helps with automation, creativity, and overall intelligent decision-making while strengthening security. Organisations process large datasets, and AI-powered public cloud helps in real-time monitoring, optimizing workflows, and accelerating digital transformation.
Better business continuity
An interruption in the operational workflow can incur huge losses to the organisation. Opting for a hybrid cloud management platform has numerous benefits, including disaster recovery, restoring data access, and ensuring backup to prevent data loss. With storage taken care of and speedy disaster recovery, it ensures business continuity and reduces downtime.
Planning to move to a hybrid cloud – Here’s what to consider
Adopting an enterprise hybrid cloud from on-premises storage and cloud requires a plan. When it comes to large enterprises, there are a lot of things at stake, and hence they need to be carefully evaluated. Steps to consider:
- Evaluate the IT infrastructure – Develop clear strategies like identifying critical data, the right migration tools, and evaluating the potential downtime during the migration process. Also, evaluate the current on-prem infrastructure, like existing servers, networking, WAN, etc., and if it is compatible with the cloud.
- Workload classification – As an enterprise, after the evaluation of the IT infrastructure, it is time to rank the apps and software based on data sensitivity, cost of migration, latency needs, etc. This helps in deciding which data needs to be moved to the public cloud and which stays on-prem.
- Choose the right cloud service partners – It is time to choose the right providers who can seamlessly connect the private and public cloud infrastructure. Opt for a unified hybrid platform that supports existing systems, minimizes downtime, and controls cost. With the right partner, it is convenient to align all cloud partnerships under a single umbrella to maximise performance.
- Consider the cost – Different service providers have different pricing models and a range of additional services. The models include many service costs like cloud storage, platform costs, server costs, maintenance costs, monitoring costs, etc. Before finalising, compare all the costs and choose the appropriate one.
- Ensure robust security – IT infrastructure, if not well-protected, is prone to external breach and loss of sensitive information. Once the migration is finalized, the next step is to tighten the lid on security with the implementation of a zero-trust framework, encryption, and an advanced security program.
- Compliance and regulations – Moving to a hybrid cloud architecture requires adherence to and incorporation of regulatory compliance. Companies can tailor data migration and protection depending on geographical locations. Hybrid cloud offers flexibility to organizations and helps in keeping up to date with governance.
Hybrid cloud solutions have helped many large enterprises to modernize their existing IT infrastructure. Migration to a hybrid cloud offers greater flexibility, security, innovation, and convenience with constant managed services. By combining the control of on-prem infrastructure with the scalability of public cloud, enterprises can focus on growth and continued operations. This helps in segregating workload and saves costs associated with the maintenance of an in-house data center. With the right strategy, technology partners, and governance in place, hybrid cloud allows businesses to future-proof their operations, strengthen data protection, and stay competitive in a fast-evolving digital world driven by AI and intelligent automation.
Looking to transform your business with hybrid cloud solutions? Connect with Redington and get seamless end-to-end execution.
