When Does a Hybrid Cloud Make Sense? Find Out if Your Business Fits the Profile.

It used to be that business leaders compared the pros and cons of public clouds vs. private clouds, taking a deliberate approach to deciding which is the intelligent choice. Thanks to benefits like increased scalability, flexibility, security, and cutting costs, it’s no wonder cloud services began taking the world by storm. 

Today, most companies are not deciding between public or private clouds—they’re using both. Hybrid cloud adoption is gaining ground across most industries and verticals as the future of computing. Research shows that 82% of large enterprises use a hybrid cloud infrastructure. (Source: Faction). However, setting up an actual hybrid cloud, integrating public and private cloud environments, and orchestrating workflows between the two, is no easy task. And on top of that, how do companies know if a hybrid cloud is right for them? What are the best use cases for a hybrid cloud? 

Let’s dig deeper to find out. 

  • Disaster recovery planning – A survey by Statista revealed that 25% of respondents shared an eye-opening figure: the average of a single hour of downtime cost in lost revenue circled between $301,000 and $400,000. These costs hit between $137 and $427 per minute for small- to medium-sized businesses. (Source: Carbonite). Whatever numbers fit your industry or company size, it’s clear that disaster recovery planning is a must. Regular data backups, along with processes, policies, and tools, serve as an ‘insurance policy’ for companies to minimize the adverse effects of outages. Administrators can spin up virtual machines to fill the void when an on-premise environment is inoperable. Hybrid cloud architectures are a flexible and cost-effective way to prepare for unexpected events. They can expand rapidly to that backup environment. Also, it can give enterprises access to IT resources from diverse geographic locations. 
  • Application development – A hybrid cloud brings many benefits if your company manages an application development project. In many cases, it makes sense to use the public cloud for DevOps because it is relatively fast and straightforward. Yet, once applications are ready to deploy into a production environment, many enterprises move these workloads back to an on-prem data center to improve governance or keep costs down. Using a hybrid cloud, organizations benefit from the speed and flexibility of the public cloud during development and the stability, security, and lower costs in production.
  • Running an Identity and Access Management (IAM) program – Securing and controlling employee access to apps and computing resources has become increasingly difficult in our cloud-based, mobile-first world. The hybrid cloud can make the process easier for IT teams using Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions such as Microsoft’s Active Directory. Running AD in a hybrid cloud lets administrators retain total control over this critical IAM service on-prem while allowing cloud applications to ‘authenticate’ against identities. This model supports centralized management of a single IAM platform instead of maintaining multiple identities in various cloud environments.

The power to choose

The hybrid cloud deserves consideration for companies looking at cloud options in the year ahead. There are several use cases where the benefits of increased agility, scalability, and flexibility are hard to beat. Today more than ever, businesses can get much more granular in their planning —identifying the best resource for a particular application, for instance. 

IT leaders cannot only match the right cloud to the right resource but also have the flexibility to move the workload quickly based on costs, additional data privacy or compliance requirements, or any other relevant factor.

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