Why the hybrid cloud is becoming more relevant today

As enterprises brace for the impact of the Covid 19, one technology has risen to its claim of being resilient and scalable. The sudden shift of millions of people to a remote work infrastructure has been made possible only due to the cloud. The cloud is also powering a host of services that have made people productive. From cloud-based collaboration tools (Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Webex) to cloud-based telephony tools, almost every service is possible only due to the cloud.

That said, a slew of cloud outages has happened recently, partly due to the huge increase in consumption both from business-related services and consumer-facing services. Usage of video collaboration tools and conferencing tools have zoomed. Simultaneously, there's been an increase in consumption of streaming content provided by players such as Netflix and Disney. The increase in outages has made organizations wary of putting all their eggs in one basket. This has led to the adoption of multicloud or hybrid cloud models.

The Covid-19 situation has only accelerated this process, as organizations look to diversify their risk by shifting their workloads across multiple clouds. This is corroborated by IDC, which has noted that the public cloud option is not an ideal option for every organization. In a recent press note, IDC's Jyoti Lalchandani, group vice president & regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) states that the public cloud is not necessarily an appropriate option for all types of workloads. She states that some enterprises are choosing to keep certain workloads on-premises – using an in-house datacenter – or on private clouds, as it helps them achieve better performance, 24/7 availability, enhanced security and greater compliance with regulations.

IDC predicts that by 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.

In the current situation, as enterprises look at their internal IT roadmap, they will look to optimize their costs and reduce their risks. In this context, the hybrid cloud option is the best option. Using a mix of on-premise and/or private / public cloud from multiple providers, hybrid multicloud offers organizations freedom and flexibility to run their workload on-premise or cloud and even change cloud providers, if required. Further, a hybrid multicloud approach enables organizations to adopt common management and software development capabilities across the environment.

Key trends

Some of the key benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud approach include:

• Step-by-step incremental approach to the cloud
  By using a hybrid cloud option, you could choose to test out specific workloads and see what works best. An organization can decide to go for a modular approach, which allows it to test deployment configurations and make adjustments when required. The modular approach enables enterprises to take a measured and controlled deployment, which in turn saves manpower and infrastructure-related costs. This is extremely critical in the current situation.
• Flexibility and scalability
  The hybrid cloud option makes it extremely easy for organizations to scale up or scale down their infrastructure in conjunction with their on-premise infrastructure.
• Faster time to market
  You could leverage the power of the cloud for specific workloads. An organization can choose to have some applications on-premise and decide to host modules that require frequent updates on the cloud.
• Regulatory compliance
  Many enterprises are bound by regulatory requirements for storing their data within a defined geographical area. By opting for a hybrid cloud option, organizations can choose to have some part of data on-premise and decide to choose the cloud for hosting data that is not bound by regulatory clauses.
• Low latency
  Latency can affect data transmission rates, and can hugely affect performance or insights. In industrial plants that have a huge deployment of sensors, it may not make sense to host applications on the cloud, as sensors generate huge amounts of data which can affect the bandwidth. A hybrid cloud can help enterprises use on-premise hardware for latency critical applications with the flexibility, scalability and lower cost of ownership of the public cloud for other applications. This is corroborated by research from IDC, which states that by 2022, 40% of enterprises will have doubled their IT asset spending in edge locations and nearby colocation services versus core data centers to deliver digital services to local users.

In summary, important factors such as cost, compliance and latency issues will accelerate the drive towards hybrid cloud adoption