Hybrid cloud

According to Logic Monitor’s Cloud Vision 2020: The Future of the Cloud 83 percent of enterprises will host all of their workloads in the cloud by 2020. Of all types of cloud hosting, hybrid is growing the fastest with Gartner predicting that up to 90 percent of organisations will have some type of hybrid cloud by 2020.

What is hybrid cloud?

Hybrid cloud is a mix of private, public cloud and on premise hosting. While there will be integrations and touchpoints between them, each infrastructure is independent so there’s no chance of data leaking from one platform to another.

In today’s world, where keeping on top of security is a constant challenge this is a big consideration in the decision to move to the cloud. Ever since cloud hosting became an option IT managers have often agonised about how secure it is. The Netskope Cloud Security Report 2019 says 49 percent of organisations believe public clouds are at a higher risk of security breaches than traditional on premise environments and explains why a high number of organisations have decided to switch from public to private cloud.

Cloud’s role in transforming business

However, the business benefits of moving to the cloud cannot be understated. The relative ease of adding resources to servers and to move applications at will, is changing the face of many businesses.

The likes Uber and Airbnb are proof of how constant change can lead to growth, through the cloud hosting model. Nathan Blecharczyk Airbnb’s co-founder and CTO is on record as saying that it was the ease of customising the stack that first attracted it to using cloud and acknowledges it as the easy answer for any business that wants to scale to the next level.

Efficiencies, lower costs and scalability

It isn’t just enterprises that benefit. Numerous smaller businesses are capitalising on cloud’s ability to enable remote and on-site workers to collaborate, so that businesses can be more efficient, responsive and scale resources according to peaks and troughs.

It’s also a more cost-effective model, as businesses pay only for the resources they use, as and when they need to use them.

Add skills as and when you need them Some commentators estimate up to 100,000 technology related jobs remain unfilled in the UK. With the shortage of IT talent and costs of hiring, training and keeping skilled personnel, the case for partnering with MSPs will often make a great deal of sense for small and mid-sized businesses.

Take the case of DevOps for example. As new ways of working have evolved to serve the need for businesses to be more agile – developing products and services much faster – DevOps has become the go tool to facilitate this. Cloud adoption is essential for DevOps. With the hybrid cloud there’s the option to innovate faster, while maintaining the status quo with some workloads.

With the benefits, come the risks

Cloud computing helps businesses to meet the growing need for services and applications that are easy to access, navigate and use on any device. While this gives organisations remarkable agility, it also creates another challenge for businesses to watch out for: endpoint security.

The good news is, that as fast as this has become an issue, software has evolved to offer a solution.

Future drivers of hybrid adoption

So it’s clear that hybrid cloud is clearly outperforming other types of cloud, in terms of adoption rates. And, the way that things are going, regarding data protection, regulations and so on, it looks as if this will persist.

After all, some organisations, say those that are governed by strict data sovereignty rules, are governed by regulations to keep some workloads on premise and only shift less sensitive data to the cloud.

Pat Gelsinger CEO of VMWare predicted recently that data sovereignty, in addition to physical location and economics are the three main factors that will continue to drive hybrid’s appeal into the future.

Thinking about a move to the cloud? Get in touch with us to discuss a transition and find out how your company can become so much more efficient.