05-30-17 | Blog Post
In today’s modern IT world, whether you have a new project, line of business, or a newer version of an existing product line, you’ll need to scale, and scale quickly. More organizations have been turning to hybrid cloud to do that, and the market reflects that–according to RightScale, hybrid cloud is the preferred strategy for enterprises. Why is the hybrid cloud the best way to scale your environment?
A public cloud delivers resources over the internet instead of being tied to hardware, which means it’s easy to grow virtual servers. This all sounds simple, but there are a few challenges that can prevent you from scaling properly and reaching your business goals. These include talent acquisition, difficulty with the platform, surprising billing, or a public cloud outage, all of which can lead to serious problems for public cloud users.
But hybrid cloud provides the scalability most businesses seek by integrating public cloud resources with an organization’s existing infrastructure, so they can provide new capabilities to their end user while reducing costs even more. Essentially, hybrid cloud solutions give organizations unlimited resources on demand while maximizing their existing infrastructure investments. Businesses like the flexibility behind the model, and it’s for this reason that hybrid cloud adoptions continue to rise.
Adopting a hybrid cloud model doesn’t necessarily free you from the challenges public cloud presents. It all depends on how your solution is architected and managed. If you manage your hybrid cloud yourself, you’ll likely find the same challenges of talent acquisition, or platform difficulty (perhaps more so) that a pure public cloud approach presents. Even cost management may not fully be solved if you don’t know where to place your workloads. Therefore, it’s critical to work with your cloud service provider to architect a proper solution that addresses the scalability and growth your business needs while taking advantage of your current infrastructure. To that end, consider a managed hybrid cloud provider who will not only work with you to architect the right solution but also remove the other obstacles that managing the environment entails.
For example, a provider can offer cloud experts already trained in cloud architecture and management, so you can put your IT team to work on other projects to drive revenue growth. A managed provider will also handle your hybrid platform for you if you wish, or work together with you to make sure you’re getting everything you want from your systems.
Perhaps most importantly, a managed hybrid cloud provider can also help you keep track of your billing, so you can manage costs (the #1 challenge of mature cloud users, according to RightScale). Early adopters discovered how complex and confusing the public cloud billing model is. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone on your team who understands how it works, and make sure you’re scaling efficiently? It’s easy for a new project to get derailed because of spiraling cloud costs. A managed provider will monitor your environment and can alert you to any sudden increases in your cloud spend, freeing you from the hassle of trying to figure out which cloud is getting what percentage of your budget.
Because a hybrid cloud takes advantage of an organization’s existing infrastructure, it’s more cost effective to scale than a pure private cloud or public cloud. Hybrid cloud implementations give organizations unlimited resources on demand, and it is this flexibility that is the driving factor behind the use of a hybrid cloud solution. While there can be many challenges to adopting a hybrid cloud solution, a managed cloud provider can help you overcome them to promote an efficient, lean, scalable cloud.
If you’re ready to scale your infrastructure faster and more cost effectively, talk with a cloud expert today and set up a demo to learn more.
