Hybrid cloud can bring you the best of on-premises, colocation, and cloud computing. You can combine public or private cloud with your own IT infrastructure to enhance overall business agility and cost-effectiveness. At the same time, you can ensure compliance, security, reliability, and returns on existing IT investments. A hybrid cloud strategy gives you a roadmap to the benefits that are important for your enterprise or organization.
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What does hybrid cloud mean for you?
In general, hybrid cloud is a mix of conventional IT infrastructure using physical servers and cloud computing based on virtual machines and storage. But how does it apply to you?
Suppose your organization has made investments in its own IT infrastructure over the last few years. In parallel, suppose that an opportunity or a need has just developed that your organization can address, but only if it can periodically process large additional amounts of data, some of which may be confidential or sensitive. This situation can arise in many sectors. Examples include retailing chains reacting to changing consumer tastes, financial institutions dealing with fluctuating interest rates, and healthcare and government entities coping with health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hybrid cloud solution that works best for you in this case should therefore let you continue to get value from your existing IT resources, provide safeguards for sensitive data, and offer flexibility to handle periodic peaks in data processing workloads. To get the hybrid cloud solution that is right for you, you need to balance conventional IT and cloud in accordance with your specific requirements.
Create your strategy roadmap for hybrid cloud benefits
The best way to make sure of hybrid cloud benefits is to know what business and IT improvements you want and how hybrid cloud will help you to get them.
Besides your high-level goals, your IT workloads will drive your hybrid cloud strategy. Start by systematically examining the applications your enterprise needs to run and the data that fuels them. See if a workload must stay on your own servers, if it can run more cost-effectively or with higher performance in the cloud, or if new cloud technology will let you replace it.
Some workloads may have requirements for low latency interactions with other systems, high-speed data transfers, or frequent backup to distributed storage domains for robust disaster recovery. A hybrid cloud strategy may then involve colocation of systems in data centers like those managed for customers by eStruxture, with high-speed connections to a range of different cloud service providers. Data centers configured as private clouds, whether on-premises or in colocation, can offer cloud automation and functionality with enhanced security for business-critical applications.
Use hybrid cloud to boost your business agility
Your IT exists to support your enterprise in achieving its goals and responding effectively to challenges and opportunities. Business environments can change frequently. Your organization needs to be agile enough to react in time, stay competitive, keep existing customers, win new ones, and remain compliant. The ability to develop, test, and deploy IT applications rapidly is important for high speed to market, fast time to value, and ultimately customer and stakeholder satisfaction.
Cloud providers use virtualization and automation to make their resources available to users at any time. This enables you to be agile in the following ways:
Reaction time: Market opportunities with narrow windows and urgent mission-critical requirements need quick action.
Scalability: Peaks in demand affect most organizations. A hybrid cloud approach lets you absorb increases in demand, switching on cloud resources when needed and switching them off afterwards.
Optimize your return on investment (ROI) and cut costs
Even if some start-ups are “born in the cloud”, many organizations already have substantial investments in their own IT infrastructure. After initial capital investment, your own IT infrastructure may be giving you good performance at relatively low marginal cost. Before making any plans to scrap existing resources, it therefore makes sense to compare the amortized costs for your own data centre with the cloud. Be sure to account for all relevant elements. For on-premises facilities for example, they include staffing, space, and power, as well as server maintenance and upgrades. For the cloud, they include costs of renting virtual machines and moving data to and from the cloud.
Using a combination of colocation and cloud can also enhance cost efficiency and effectiveness. For example, eStruxture colocation offers you customizable physical data centre facilities via cabinets, cages, and private suites with high-density, low-cost power from sustainable sources.
Improve your IT security
Cloud providers base their own business models on economies of scale. They hire large teams of expert support and security engineers and continually check, maintain, and update their systems to ensure high levels of security. As a result, cloud security at the host infrastructure level is often as good or better than that of on-premises data centres.
Enterprises still have cybersecurity responsibilities of their own in the cloud. For instance, even if the provider offers identity and access management tools, you need to configure authentication and authorization for your users.
Private cloud solutions allow you to strengthen security further. Whereas the public cloud offers accessibility from anywhere over the Internet and shares resources between multiple clients, a private cloud focuses on security and dedicates its resources to one client or entity. The eStruxture Private Cloud service enhances security through private connections for data transmission, 24/7/365 expert support, and vendor partnerships for best-in-class virtualization software.
Reinforce your business continuity and compliance
The cloud offers extensive possibilities for data backup and recovery. Providers with geographically distributed data centers like us can offer automated data replication and backup procedures over interconnected sites for data integrity and resilience. Disaster recovery time can be reduced from days or even weeks to just hours or minutes, especially when compared to traditional solutions like tape backup.
As eStruxture offers high-speed dark fibre interconnection between several of its sites in distributed locations in Canada as well as fast links to cloud providers, you can achieve great flexibility in how and where your data is safeguarded by using a hybrid cloud combination of colocation and cloud.
Cloud providers can also help you comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR by guaranteeing that your data will always remain within a specified geographical area. Data sovereignty can thus be ensured, extending your options for data collection, processing, and storage into the cloud, as well as on-premises and in colocations.
Make your IT fit your business (not the other way around)
You can create your own customized compute platform with cloud functionality and expert support by using a private cloud solution from eStruxture, for high performance and flexibility or increased cost-effectiveness of virtual services. In addition, eStruxture makes more than 20 key carriers directly available from its colocation centres. Your private cloud can then integrate seamlessly with on-premises infrastructure and with other hosted cloud solutions.
Automated cloud management and services can free your IT team from tasks of lower strategic value like daily server and platform administration. Your team can then focus on higher value projects like ERP or project and portfolio management. The cloud is also a great place to experiment with new applications and test data, and processes such as DevOps. After development or redesign, applications and processes can be deployed in the cloud or back in your own data centre, according to your hybrid cloud strategy and business needs.
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