Hybrid cloud can enable a full cloud experience (and full cloud benefits) by seamlessly choreographing the different platforms – with less churn, more scalability, better data deployment and improved business speed and flexibility. But how can you ensure this value-creating harmony and integration come together? This is challenging, but not impossible.

Can’t go all-in on public cloud? Go hybrid

In cloud everything just scales with need. But for many organizations, becoming “fully hyper-scalers” is not yet realistic, for natural reasons. Organizational approaches to compliance or data protection and limitations of IT structures, e.g. in terms of latency, are just a few hurdles. In these scenarios, hybrid cloud is the right fit.

Done right, hybrid cloud can fully enable true cloud benefits in a way that integrates organizations’ current systems/platforms into cloud counterparts, allowing workloads to shift seamlessly between private and public clouds – giving businesses greater flexibility, scalability and speed, with more data deployment options. This also enables cost effectiveness and cost forecasting, as detailed in our new white paper.

Full benefits of hybrid cloud IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing infrastructure and service where organizations lease needed servers and cloud computing power from a service provider. It brings flexibility, scalability and efficiency to operations with various cost savings possible to achieve.

With hybrid cloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), organizations can fulfil various business needs. IaaS offers flexibility and scalability for businesses to meet the changes in demand and operating environment. IaaS can also be used to manage infrastructure-as-code to optimise IT environment costs. And IaaS avoids quality issues by applying software management quality practices to infrastructure environments. IaaS also puts businesses in full control of their security implementation with automated controls.

Consider industrial cases where part of a system needs to be close to manufacturing sites, where applications need office locations and big data lakes for analytics in public clouds to leverage ready tools. Without hybrid cloud, this complexity is virtually impossible to manage competitively.

Cloud connects developers with a very rich environment filled with ready-made solutions that you simply cannot ignore if you want to be competitive today. These resources facilitate development of optimized applications, in terms of both cost and lead-time to implementation, while providing endless flexibility for growth. Traditionally, these features were available only via public cloud IaaS, but hybrid cloud enabled solutions now offer these benefits through privately hosted elements within hybrid contexts.

Hybrid Cloud offers flexible implementations with full cloud experience

As with any cloud transformation, adopting hybrid cloud starts with defining your organization’s situation, targets and challenges. Hybrid cloud cannot empower your cloud transformation without a solid business case. Business needs, not technology, should always drive solution selection – so define your needs before selecting a technological solution.

Then comes the implementation and introduction phases. This is when organizations need to leverage partners more in order to deploy the benefits to their teams sustainably and with speed. Hybrid solutions are intrinsically more complicated and require wider skill sets to harness their potential. That means a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach can simply kill your business case for going to cloud both in terms of costs and lead time to reaping benefits. Organizations committed to this journey should choose a partner that has resolved the technical challenges, has made them easy to overcome and can reliably deliver at scale. The dream of “pressing the button and deploying” is not far from the truth when the previous phases have been thorough.

Make no mistake, true cloud benefits can be achieved with the hybrid cloud approach – meaning accelerating innovation and go-to-market processes while safeguarding business continuity. Hybrid cloud enables this with automated and secure cloud services that provide resiliency and reliability as well as agility and productivity – and you can achieve over 30% TCO savings compared to traditional infrastructure services. Not to mention indirect effects like increased productivity and reduced technical debt from IT infrastructure. And because hybrid cloud solutions are built on top of current IT systems, a total infrastructure revamp is unnecessary.

Today, when elasticity and scalability are not luxuries but critical business assets, every organization should ask a vital question: why not reap the benefits? Check out also my colleague's post how to move your enterprise applications to the cloud.

Want more insights? Check out IDC Nordic Cloud Survey 2020!