Hybrid cloud infrastructures have capability to transform enterprise IT by enabling restructuring of virtual, private, and public cloud offerings. As per a reliable report based on an authentic survey, hybrid cloud is an infrastructure of choice for more than half of the existing enterprises to deploy a wide spectrum of applications. This study report was presented in 2017 Cloud Leadership Summit. 

In spite of multiple roadblocks including security, governance and integration the hybrid model of cloud computing represents a highly simplified approach to the concerns, which were also found to impact on-site IT infrastructures. Thanks to hybrid cloud solutions, more and more enterprises are being empowered by optimization of their existing IT resources to handle fluctuating workloads across the entire gamut of business processes.

Managing a Diverse Application Environment

Evolution of cloud strategies can be described as an organic process rather than a planned development. In the beginning, cloud based applications were used for the automation of processes that did not belong to the roadmap of enterprise IT. This can be understood by looking at some of the examples such as email and reporting applications and collaboration tools that were essentially based on SaaS hosting models.

Moreover, it is observed that cloud adoption can be a daunting process in case of some legacy applications and vital data workloads. Alternatively, it is also extremely difficult to substitute these with applications that are cloud based. These situations demand adoption of private cloud instances although these are ideally suited for high-value transactions and mission critical processes in healthcare or financial sectors.

Democratization of IT Deployments

Modern organizations are in the process of rapidly moving away from centralized decision making processes as far as IT deployments are concerned. Diversification of workloads that are getting more complex with every passing day is attributed to rampant digitalization of IT ecosystem. The sheer volume and complexities of these complex workloads render traditional IT teams highly ineffective in terms of understanding or managing these workloads.

Moreover, the very fact that decentralized teams enjoy a greater proximity of working with these workloads and can be expected to possess a better knowledge and understanding of such workloads. Their understanding can span the most important aspects of these workloads including needs for scalability, latency, security, and utilization.

Hybrid cloud deployment can facilitate the decentralization process and extend the decision making to diverse IT teams from legacy decision making teams. Moreover, the enterprise can also adopt the most suitable or bespoke model of cloud deployment for every type of workload.

This is best understood by considering the following examples. Less critical and routine workloads such as payroll management can be assigned to public cloud applications that are also significantly economical. More sensitive workloads such as payment processing, or supply chain related workloads can be moved to virtual private clouds.

Improving Infrastructure-Compatibility of Workloads

Cost effectiveness and greater efficiency are the two most attractive attributes of cloud environment that will drive more and more organizations towards its adoption.

Owners of business processes will be required to assign workloads by clearly understanding their compatibility with either private or public cloud models.

Costs of infrastructures, network and server have been dropping considerably, thanks to an increased adoption of cloud applications. In such a scenario, adoption of private cloud applications is sure to extend across all enterprises irrespective of sizes. 

Traditionally, as many as seven workloads out of ten have continued to remain stagnant and there is an excellent potential for such workloads to be moved to cloud. Organizations will also be able to save significantly by improving TCO, if they embark upon private cloud adoption in a major way.

Advantages of a Hybrid Cloud Environment

Hybrid cloud models will actually accelerate the process of cloud adoption since a hybrid environment is more suitable to accommodate diverse workloads. Enterprise IT teams can be expected to command better control on costing and resource management of IT because hybrid cloud hosting will eliminate the need to invest in capital infrastructure or purchasing of software licenses.

Hybrid clouds can empower business teams with seamless flexibility of moving workloads to public or private clouds without any hassles. This will improve availability, security and efficiency of different business processes depending upon their features.

Management of piloting and workload testing can be extremely cost intensive in a legacy IT setup owing to the variability of such workloads. In contrast, a hybrid cloud model can effectively support these workloads without any significant burden on costs.

Strategic Importance of Hybrid Cloud Management

It can be appreciated that one cannot hope to have a one-size-fits-all cloud hosting solution for managing complex as well as diverse workloads that vary in terms of needs of security and availability. This underlines need for every organization to design a tailor-made cloud adoption strategy.

Depending upon the nature of mission critical workloads, enterprises can choose to adopt a variety of decentralized or private infrastructure involving multiple platforms and models of deployment to create individual cloud ecosystem.

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