Hybrid Cloud Poised for Growth

The term “hybrid” refers to a combination of two things. In cloud computing, the hybrid cloud refers to a composition of two or more types of cloud (private, community, and public). This gives organisations the benefits of using multiple deployment options for different needs. The use of the hybrid cloud caters to different challenges organisations face with the use of IT.

Tackling Business Needs

On the one hand, there are teams in organisations that are tasked with rapidly producing services and applications to improve operational performance, often known as DevOps. These teams focus on finding faster ways to deliver applications and workloads to enable new business opportunities and growth, generally measuring performance in weeks rather than months or years. For these teams, the use of public cloud models helps them in their tasks. On the other hand, traditional IT teams must deliver applications and workloads that require trust, visibility, and reliability. Because of these requirements, such applications are generally housed within the organisation’s own data centre or private cloud.

Hybrid cloud use enables these different business needs to be handled centrally by the IT department even though the needs of the teams running the services are different. This provides organisations with greater flexibility, letting them support traditional IT requirements that require high levels of security and governance as they simultaneously embrace the need for greater agility in services delivery.

Growth of the Cloud

According to Technology Business Research, the market for the hybrid cloud is currently at an early stage of maturity, but it will likely see growth of 50 per cent during 2015, compared to 35 per cent for private cloud and 25 per cent for public cloud deployments. One of the reasons behind the high growth level is that the hybrid model provides organisations with the security of a private deployment model alongside the low cost of using public cloud resources.

In order to fully gain the benefits of a hybrid model, organisations must first define their business goals and objectives in order to ensure their technology investments are correctly aligned and to cater to the differing needs within the business. Which area of the business needs to enable rapid growth? Which particular workloads and applications need to be deployed in an agile manner and should therefore be deployed in a public cloud environment? Almost every organisation that runs its own data centre or rents services from a provider must balance traditional IT needs that require the use of a private deployment model with the need for greater agility, which is better suited to public cloud environments.

However, it is only by putting in the work up front to understand current and future workloads in terms of the issues of performance, compliance, storage, data protection, and automation level for each specific workload that organisations will fully realise the benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud model.