Enterprises are no longer settling on either a public cloud or a private cloud. They’re increasingly choosing to have their cake and eat it, too, by choosing the hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud platform allows businesses to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud without ditching their legacy systems.
So how exactly does a hybrid cloud platform help transform IT? Let’s find out below.
1. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Every enterprise needs a disaster recovery and business continuity strategy. Backing up data in the cloud isn’t the only thing this strategy can do. It also allows an enterprise to continue to do business during a system failure or a disaster. The organization should continue operating as if the disaster never happened. A business continuity strategy should consider recovery, resilience, and contingency. A hybrid cloud can help with this. The hybrid cloud can extend on-premise resources into the public cloud.
Most businesses do not have the on-premises infrastructure to support their disaster recovery needs. This is why they turn to public cloud service providers. Having a disaster recovery strategy set up on the cloud enables organizations to have flexible storage and planned migrations and recovery. It also allows them to have automated failover testing and virtual machine replication. A hybrid cloud platform can handle common disaster recovery use cases and variable capacity requirements.
2. Prevent Gaps Resulting from Legacy Technology
Businesses that run legacy systems can derive a lot of value from a hybrid cloud. It is sometimes expensive to keep outmoded legacy systems fully upgraded. For this reason, many businesses choose to use hybrid cloud models to cover the gaps in their legacy systems. This sort of deployment will become more common in large enterprises as they try to salvage their legacy systems without doing a full migration.
3. Perfect for Startups
Startups often have shaky business models that are unproven. Their offerings could either fail or be wildly successful. For this reason, decision-makers must make sure there’s enough capacity to handle any scenario.
Startups should avoid making a significant investment in on-premises systems at launch. Instead, they can take advantage of a hybrid cloud platform where they keep mission-critical data in-house. They can, then, extend the rest of the resources into a public cloud. Investments in additional private cloud resources are only justifiable after the product or service scales.
4. Content Delivery and Edge Computing
Enterprises can leverage the hybrid cloud to provide content delivery resources. Having remote data centers helps them place valuable information closer to the user. It becomes easier to control data flow intelligently throughout the cloud.
5. Support Peak Traffic
Traffic levels during peak usage periods can easily get out of hand and overwhelm an organization’s legacy system. Seasonal events that cause spikes in usage do not warrant an investment in IT infrastructure. The best bet is a cloud service provider that allows for the provisioning of new application workloads when needed. Having a public cloud provider on standby is a cost-effective way to deal with peak traffic.
