Why more companies are choosing the hybrid cloud model

A look at how the hybrid cloud gives organizations the flexibility and security they need.

By WP BrandStudio

When it comes to data storage, organizations of all sizes must eventually confront the same question: Are workloads best kept in a private data center or in the public cloud? Both options have distinct benefits for storing data, running applications and handling workloads. Choosing one strategy or the other — or the appropriate blend of the two — will depend on a company’s unique needs and evolving customer demands. Business and IT leaders would do well to look at some of the critical factors at play.

Keeping data accessible

Private cloud operations, or the traditional IT practice of managing a data center on one’s own premises (“on prem”), allows a company to manage data and workloads internally. This option tends to be the natural inclination of most business owners.

The principal reason? “Control,” says Naveen Chhabra, a senior analyst at Forrester specializing in enterprise cloud storage and security.

Let’s say you’re a news reporting agency, and you’re working on a deadline due to publish at 8am tomorrow. You need to have a few videos available from key spokespersons. “To get those back from a public cloud would require extensive time just to ship [request] that data,” says Chhabra. For instance, transferring 100 terabytes of bulk data would take about 12 days with an immediate response and a download speed of 1 Gbps on the public internet, or 1.2 days on a faster private network at 10 Gbps speed.

In other words, where your data lives dictates physical limitations such as speed, bandwidth and data transfer.

Media companies aren’t the only ones that need quick data access. Speed is a crucial factor that many industries have to take into account when considering private cloud solutions. For many industries, the quicker you can leverage applications and bring them to market, the greater the competitive advantage.

Even in cases where it’s important to access data quickly, speed and control aren’t the only considerations. For example, cost, integration with other applications, compliance requirements and data protection considerations also come into play.

Bottom-line benefits

The cost of IT infrastructure is often top of mind for organizations large and small. When it comes to saving money, an off-premises data storage solution — hosting data with a public cloud provider — can easily tip the scales in favor of that approach.

“When you look at cost considerations, a lot of that comes down to the workloads involved,” says Aaron Chaisson, Vice President of Infrastructure Portfolio Messaging at Dell Technologies.

“However, applications that are more predictable in nature require tight integration with multiple data sources, or where data generation is physically distributed, such as IoT use cases. These workloads are often most effectively run on-prem.”

So private cloud may win out for control and agility, while public cloud scores points for short-lived or experimental workloads. Of course, the importance assigned to each of these factors will vary by organization. To make matters more complicated, these priorities can also vary by department within a single organization.

Fortunately, there is no need to choose between one or the other. While on- and off-prem solutions each offer distinct benefits, a hybrid cloud solution — a mix of both public and private cloud — offers a strategic advantage for organizations by granting them the flexibility to store data where they want it while also scaling workloads more efficiently.

The best of both worlds

The flexibility of placing a workload in either a public cloud or private cloud is a key benefit of hybrid solutions. A hybrid cloud is essentially a management framework that allows an organization to dynamically provision applications across a private cloud and public cloud landscape. It enables a company to make its data as accessible as needed, to maintain the level of control it desires and to flexibly scale compute power and availability to provide the level of service its customers expect. For example, Dell Technologies Cloud delivers cloud without the chaos, enabling you to deliver cloud capabilities anywhere with a consistent experience,  meaning faster results, consistent operations and consistent infrastructure.

In other words, hybrid cloud offers a breadth of potential options to satisfy most stakeholders. Among health care organizations, the hybrid cloud has made it easier to virtualize patient data while providing the security needed to meet HIPAA requirements. In the industrial sector, manufacturers are adopting the hybrid cloud to increase their flexibility when managing IoT-related data. These are just a few of the many industries already embracing the benefits of hybrid cloud architectures.

However, implementing a hybrid solution is not without its challenges, especially for large legacy organizations still in the early stages of their digital transformation. These firms may have little experience with enterprise cloud services and a large amount of unsorted data stored in departmental silos, or even in individual employees’ storage accounts.

“I think one of the single biggest obstacles for companies is gaining comprehensive visibility into what their storage infrastructure looks like,” says Chhabra. “I was just in a conversation with a public cloud provider and asked how many storage accounts they typically have in the enterprise segment. It was a number running into a few hundreds. So, managing that effectively is certainly a challenge.” With such a high number of accounts, management becomes exponentially more complex and gaining visibility is more difficult.

Another challenge is maintaining security once formerly contained data migrates into the cloud. While public cloud providers tend to be more vigilant than most when it comes to cybersecurity, the sheer breadth of one’s data exposure in the cloud can be problematic.

“When you have hundreds of storage accounts running within an organization, managing that at a comprehensive level can be very difficult to implement,” says Chhabra. “Not just from the data standpoint but also from the security standpoint—who gets access to what, when, why and how.”

As with all aspects of digital transformation, overcoming such obstacles just takes persistence, IT expertise and time.