5 min readDigital disruption is paving the way for organizations to satisfy the demands of increasingly connected customers with growing expectations of instant gratification—users require faster, more adaptive experiences. Hybrid cloud adoption, an IT infrastructure model blending private and public clouds, and sometimes on-premise data systems, is progressively powering the ability to improve this customer expectation worldwide. With hybrid cloud, organizations can get the best of both on-premise and public cloud without buying new hardware, refactoring, or re-platforming, whilst leveraging existing investments, skillsets, and tools.
According to the 2020 State of the Cloud report, 87 percent of organizations have a hybrid cloud strategy, while Gartner recently predicted that by 2025, more than 80 percent of public cloud managed and professional services deals will require both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud capabilities from the provider, up from less than 50 percent in 2020. For optimal performance, organizations can combine a hybrid cloud solution with a multiple cloud service strategy (multi-cloud), where two or more cloud platforms are leveraged to perform various tasks. This eliminates the dependency on a single cloud provider, allowing organizations to select resources from several providers to maximize each unique service, increasing flexibility, mitigating against disasters, and more.
An optimized hybrid cloud also offers the scale to deliver real-time services across multiple interactive devices, as well as a platform to develop customer insights using big data and analytics. Despite these advantages, organizations with modified datacenter operations that create a hybrid cloud environment are frequently struggle to achieve an optimal state due to lack of thoughtful planning. They must focus on adopting an optimized hybrid cloud to increase scalability, improve performance, and deliver rapid cost optimization. Let’s take a brief look at each of these three benefits:
SCALABILITY
Just using a private cloud can be very limiting for an organization. Having the advantage of added security means employees are restricted to access the private cloud through unknown devices, limiting the ability to work remotely or by mobile. By optimizing the hybrid cloud, organizations can rapidly deliver key resources across the business, consequently provisioning quicker solutions for work-related challenges. This can significantly reduce time-to-market and resources required to solve crucial problems while enhancing agility in response to evolving customer and market demands. According to a recent report by IDC, worldwide internet data consumption across all sectors will grow from 33ZB in 2018 to 175ZB by 2025. Almost half of this data will pass through the hybrid cloud. By utilizing an optimized hybrid cloud organization can drive excellent customer satisfaction with the ability to scale for user demand.
For example, if an organization is exploring options to scale-up operations to improve customer satisfaction during peak hours, an optimized hybrid cloud solution could help. This will enable an extension of the organization’s on-premise infrastructure to the cloud during peak hours—thus augmenting customer service at reduced costs.
Another example is the travel industry, where activity spikes during the summer season. An optimized hybrid cloud infrastructure is built for applications that are increasingly mobile-friendly and data-intensive, and provides the flexibility and elasticity required to support sudden, unpredictable traffic spikes at scale due to resource demand.
RAPIDLY OPTIMIZE COSTS
Organizations that have reached a certain level of maturity with the existing hybrid cloud environment may not have fully adopted and transformed the way they operate. For these types of organizations, it would make sense to move to an optimized hybrid cloud model to help lower resource waste, reduce wait times for infrastructure, and further convert CapEx into OpEx.
Optimized hybrid cloud environments enable organizations to better leverage current resources, without the requirement to adopt new tools or spend on more hardware. When using an optimized hybrid cloud solution, the upfront costs of installing in-house technology are eliminated. An optimized hybrid cloud solution allow organization to scale as required, purchasing only what is immediately utilized. Procurement and implementation in the traditional way is slow and thus capacity management and a degree of guessing are used, resulting in over-capitalized systems offering little ROI. As the cloud allows for scaling on a pay-as-you-go model, the spend is greatly optimized.
IMPROVE PERFORMANCE
By moving to an optimized hybrid state, organizations get to realize the full potential of what it means to maximize flexibility. Therefore, the optimized hybrid cloud state should not be expected or treated as permanently state but be prepared to champion change with the infrastructure.
Rebalancing and/or reconfiguring any workload related layouts should be flexible enough to adapt to evolving requirements and opportunities. To truly optimize for world-class performance in an optimized hybrid cloud environment, organizations must do whatever it takes to avoid unnecessary data transfers in the datacenter. The best practice to avoid having data moved on a regular basis is to re-arrange the structure to mitigate movement between assets.
GET STARTED WITH AN OPTIMIZED HYBRID CLOUD
SoftServe is a certified partner of major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Our cloud experts maximize optimized hybrid cloud platforms with state-of-the-art techniques in data management, experience design, cloud architecture, data security, regulatory compliance, infrastructure, and organizational processes.
Increase infrastructure agility in your organization by migrating to an optimized hybrid cloud state. Streamline and optimize your technology infrastructure through an agile approach to deliver solutions quickly and efficiently.
Get started with SoftServe. For more findings on how we can help you adopt an optimized hybrid cloud, read our whitepaper, "Optimizing Hybrid Cloud Environments: Insights from the Battlefield".