Building Business Resurgence with a Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem
An expert analysis of more than 1300 industry databases shows that the US economy is on a fast track to a complete revival after the disruptions of the last two years. Several industries are posting double-digit revenue growth figures in 2022, which are a tribute to their efforts to overcome the disruptions of the last couple of years and recapture their speed and scale. Without question, a healthy economic environment opens massive opportunities for businesses, but it also means heightened competition. And healthy competition, in turn, boosts a nation’s economic health.
However, a fiercely competitive environment means that enterprises must constantly seek out ways to stay ahead of competitors. They need to rapidly transform any aspect of their business that can potentially become faster, better, or more customer centric. They also need to continuously explore new avenues for growth, avenues which may not necessarily be a traditional part of their business. Such endeavors require a high degree of enterprise agility and flexibility and a work environment where innovation and creative thinking is encouraged and embraced.
It is now clear that digital transformation is the only way for organizations to achieve scalability and resilience. In fact, past disruptions made it clear that digital laggards would be quickly relegated to the second tier. Future facing enterprises must embrace modern business enablers in the shape of the cloud, or more specifically, hybrid cloud offerings to accelerate their business into a new dimension. The choices with cloud are enormous and businesses must tread this path carefully. Or else, they risk joining the bandwagon and failing to realize their digital ambitions. There is already precedence for this with as much as 70% of enterprises failing to meet their transformation goals. This, despite the initiative still showing promises in terms of growth, with an expected CAGR of 23.6% till 2028 to be worth $1759.4 billion.
Cloud Transformation as a Savior
Cloud technologies are at the forefront of any transformative digitalization initiative. And with good reason. Cloud enables business with the enablement and acceleration of multiple digital models – from financial transactions to cloud kitchens, and from online classes to remote working. This is the reason why investments in modern cloud offerings such as edge computing, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), and containerization are racking up major cloud expenses. Many experts consider cloud to be one of the prime drivers of enterprise transformation as many public clouds contain out-of-the-box (OOB) features – in terms of computing, storage, and security - that lead to instant value realization. For example, Google Cloud offers BigQuery, a serverless data warehousing and analytics platform that uses SQL to store and query Big Data.?
In 2020, Gartner had predicted the global spending on public cloud services to grow by 23.1% - from $270 billion in 2020 to $332.3 billion in 2021. Gartner further predicts that specific offerings like composable architecture, agile work processes, and integration capabilities will continue to drive enterprise interest and spending in the cloud.
However, like all technology investments, enterprise leaders must tread carefully when adopting cloud solutions. The flexibility offered by the cloud, in terms of storage, computing, and other parameters, makes it highly customizable to every industry, organization, or even individual use case. Enterprises must thus identify and plan their cloud adoption meticulously, to ensure they gain the most out of it.
Cloud adoption typically hinges on an enterprise’s digital maturity level. In the early stages of digitalization, the focus is usually on efficiency enhancement. Later, this focus may expand to areas like improving the consumer experience or organizational competitiveness.
When it comes to cloud services, broadly there are three clear strategic segregations:
Organizations operating in today’s volatile market must be prepared to counter challenges with ready to deploy solutions and services. And here, hybrid cloud brings in the best of both worlds and offers a balanced approach to leveraging cloud services. A recent survey that quizzed IT leaders on their enterprise strategies and readiness indicated that 43% have already zeroed in on a hybrid cloud/multi-cloud strategy, i.e., harnessing a mix of public, private, and on-premise ecosystems.
Hybrid Cloud: For Holistic Enterprise Functionality
An ideal hybrid cloud ecosystem blends in the best of public and private cloud systems to allow seamless information sharing. A WAN connects these disparate platforms, and a host of orchestration techniques integrates them to facilitate workload transfer as per computing requirements. Organizations enjoy better governance and control over IT systems while orchestrating various processes across multiple applications.
The main components of the Hybrid Cloud architecture are:
Hybrid cloud offers enterprises the agility to move forward in a fast-moving digital ecosystem and constantly adapt to market changes. This is the reason why experts predict hybrid cloud market size to grow at a CAGR of 17% till 2023 to be worth $97.6 billion and then at a CAGR of 18.72% till 2010 to reach a total valuation of $173.25 billion.
A hybrid model assures business continuity, agility, and resilience, and on the other hand, it fosters cost saving, customer experience enhancement, and an improved bottom line. The benefits of a hybrid cloud ecosystem are pervasive across all operational facets:
With the renewed focus on data security availability, hybrid cloud offers a seamless solution where enterprises can reduce migration costs for sensitive business data by storing it in a hybrid network. A hybrid ecosystem also provides cost visibility in terms of capital and operational IT costs furthering its ability to foster granular cost control.
For enterprises operating across different jurisdictions and different data security legislation, this eliminates the need to build physical data centers to safeguard data.
Hybrid cloud infrastructure also offers businesses the ability to counter traffic spikes with automated, simple, fast, and inexpensive provisioning, deployment, and scaling of operations across cloud storage and public cloud computing resources. Enterprises can thus enjoy significant scalability and operational agility.
With hybrid cloud in place, businesses can respond to changing conditions and mitigate challenges faster, and with greater certainty. It is therefore unsurprising that 42% of hybrid cloud adopters cite the ability to access data from/at anywhere while 37% cite flexibility as chief factors for adoption.
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The Roadmap to Hybrid Cloud Transformation
But how can future-facing enterprises orchestrate a wholesale transformation towards hybrid cloud? A hybrid cloud transformation is much more than simply updating business tools and programs. It also involves a complete reprogram of how stakeholders think and act, and what they imbibe in everyday work. An effective hybrid cloud transformation is a full-scale organizational change.
Though each organization may chart its own unique journey towards hybrid cloud adoption, a basic roadmap would include:
I. Organization-wide education and awareness
??????Identify and define business goals (desired end-state) and the need for migration
??????Ensure alignment of larger cloud strategy with overarching business goals
II. Hybrid cloud readiness assessment
??????Outline infrastructure, operational, and application dependencies
??????Formulate migration strategies
??????Evaluate different cloud pathways based on application portfolio and suitability
III. Hybrid cloud maturity level assessment
??????Modernize legacy infrastructure to build an automated, agile, and software-defined architecture
??????Check the compatibility between public cloud and on-premises infrastructure
IV. Migration strategy development
??????Evaluate service providers, talent sourcing, investment priorities, and migration and deployment models
??????Undertake radical change management in terms of technology, and culture, on an organizational scale
V. Comprehensive enterprise cloud management strategy
??????Track usage, access, governance, security, and cost with enterprise monitoring program deployment
??????Manage infrastructure and application environment availability, performance, capacity, and provisioning with automation
??????Maintain consistent security models and policies across devices, applications, and the core infrastructure
VI. Continuous testing, learning, and adaptation
??????Repeat experimentations on test cases and non-critical workloads to measure and determine variables like resource usage and migration timeframe
??????Upskill and recruit IT staff across migration strategies
Partnering for Progress
The ways in which businesses are founded, operate, scale, and interact with customers are being defined by modern technological innovations, most of which are supported exclusively on the cloud. Hybrid cloud presents a unique opportunity for enterprises to leverage the best of cloud and its associated innovations. This is critical in a paradigm where digital has invaded all facets of business.
But, orchestrating such a sizeable change management initiative can be an onerous, error-filled, time and resource-intensive process. Many organizations balk at the idea of taking time off core business tasks to instead focus on the multiple aspects of change management and ensure they are executed to perfection to avoid any pitfalls. This is perhaps why a staggering 70% of digital transformation attempts fail at achieving the desired end goals.
The good news is organizations need not undertake this journey alone. They can turn to experienced transformation partners to help them execute an end-to-end cloud adoption and experience the strategic outcomes of hybrid cloud journey. Technology services providers can ensure that organizations safely and seamlessly transition to becoming highly efficient, agile, and secure within an optimal time and cost. Such a partnership also lets enterprises focus on business-critical and value-added tasks that help them stay competitive.