The hybrid cloud is becoming increasingly popular with businesses. It is seen as a springboard for outsourcing part of your IT infrastructure. The flexibility of this model facilitates a gradual transfer. It can also be used in a variety of ways to accelerate your company's digital transformation.
Migrating to the cloud is always a tricky decision to make. To encourage professionals to take the plunge, several specific platforms appeared in 2017. They are capable of supporting deployments mixing on-premises and online infrastructures.
This is the principle of the hybrid cloud. It enables interaction between cloud services (whether private or public) and the rest of your IT to perform different functions (workloads). Without always really realizing it, many companies have already taken the plunge, for example when using Office 365.
But for the time being, various studies indicate that the majority of tasks running on hybrid cloud environments are the least engaging possible.
According to a report presented in June 2016 by PAC, application testing, site hosting and communication/collaboration are the top three uses of the hybrid cloud.
However, there are others that represent opportunities to improve the performance and resilience of your business.
1# Securing your business
More or less well-founded fears about data confidentiality explain why companies are so reluctant to host their data in the cloud. Yet the cloud is a solution capable of ensuring both disaster recovery and business continuity.
By hosting data and applications in a service provider's datacenter, companies can safeguard their information assets even in the event of computer attack, bad weather, fire or water damage.
When it comes to business continuity, the hybrid cloud should be seen as a spare wheel to help SMEs avoid business downtime.
The high levels of availability offered by leading cloud providers guarantee a virtually uninterrupted service.
But relying on the hybrid cloud for the security of information and applications does not exempt companies from implementing various procedures.
By using such service providers, they are not delegating their responsibilities. All companies must guarantee their confidentiality and integrity.
Various techniques and attitudes need to be put in place: encryption, ANSSI-certified VPN, precise management of access and passwords... These are all essential basic rules that are all too often neglected!
2# Outsource some of your data
Not every company wants to invest in the substantial resources required to store its ever-growing data volumes. In addition to the cost of acquiring an in-house datacenter, there's also the cost of maintenance.
In this case, the use of this model should be considered in order to outsource part of your data. This may involve the archiving of less sensitive information (to satisfy any confidentiality requirements expressed by management). A hybrid model also makes it easier to satisfy occasional, but significant, storage capacity requirements.
3# Enhance your agility with DevOps
Being able to respond precisely and quickly to customer requirements is a determining factor. Launching an optimized new product or service is also a key to success. Information systems must be aligned with product and service marketing, not the other way around!
The hybrid model allows you to strengthen and accelerate your agility by simplifying the DevOps approach, a contraction of Dev (company teams responsible for application development) and Ops (for operations).
As we explained in a previous article, DevOps and the cloud help reduce time-to-market for new products and/or services, while minimizing errors (thanks in part to the automation of certain tasks). Opening instances in the cloud for testing takes just a few minutes.
These different uses represent growth drivers for all companies. But to take full advantage of them, it is essential to master two key issues:
- integration between different clouds and/or with existing IT (including the headache of legacy applications that are not all compatible with the cloud...);
- automation to effectively reduce the number of errors.
Mastering these two issues requires specialized professionals. However, these skills are rare or non-existent in many SMEs. The support of a team of experts is essential for a successful migration.
