IT professionals frequently tell us that their biggest challenge is getting more bang for the buck. Between maximizing development and operational capabilities with existing resources, maintaining or reducing costs, and preserving data security, making decisions about IT can feel like being stuck between a rock and a couple of hard places.
Although more organizations are adopting hybrid deployments as one answer to the problem, theyre seen as a temporary solution. When we asked IT professionals and business decision makers why, we found the main impediment to be lack of a common frame of reference for hybrid capabilities.
Lets unpack that. IT needs to maximize existing resources, making them more flexible and scalable and improving performance for both machines and employees. IT needs to do all of it as cheaply and safely as possible, optimizing costs and maintaining end-to-end security. A hybrid cloud deployment delivers on these requirements in five key ways:
Greater flexibility: Hybrid cloud deployments allow all sizes of enterprise to extend existing infrastructure to the cloud without massive capital investment. The capability to run multiple environments seamlessly gives IT the means to support DevOps more efficiently.
Faster scalability: A consistent hybrid cloud infrastructure lets you burst resources fast and reliably scale them down again. Use your on-premises resources to host IP and sensitive data while extending CPU-intensive activity to the cloud.
Increased performance: A consistent hybrid deployment means greater uptime and reliability, as well as increased capacity. In addition to efficient burst capability, a well-implemented hybrid reduces latency across network resources.
Real cost-efficiency: Hybrid cloud deployments are both cheaper to operate and more robust than non-hybrid solutions. The cloud side takes on maintenance and load balancing, making it easier to predict setup costs and total cost of ownership. IT can allocate staff with more precision and reduce capital expenditures overall.
Consistent security: Cloud security is proving to be more robust than traditional firewalls. Because of the way hybrid cloud allocates resources across environments, you can maintain burst capability while protecting sensitive data, apps, and intellectual property in the datacenter. Single sign-on helps your users be productiveno matter which apps or devices theyre usingwhile protecting corporate information.
A true hybrid deployment includes on-premises resources working in seamless integration with cloud resources to scale workloads efficiently. It takes advantage of the robust security in an enterprise cloud to protect data and user identities across environments. Hybrid isnt just a transitional solution; its the deployment that makes the most sense for enterprise IT.