A hybrid cloud approach can have big advantages for your organisation – improved business continuity, increased agility and innovation, cost savings, and faster deployment times. But it’s not right for every situation, so here’s our pick of when you should be thinking hybrid and why.
Use Case 1: You’ve got dynamic or frequently changing workloads.
Your organisation has a significant on-premises infrastructure, with resources that are only fully utilised during peak periods or because of seasonal spikes. As the spikes can fluctuate, you have had to estimate or predict the potential peaks and fluctuations to purchase capacity in advance as capital expenditure which is redundant for much of the year when there are no spikes in demand.
Why hybrid cloud?
Implementing a hybrid cloud approach can help increase the efficiency of your operations. If your organisation requires a consistent operational environment but deals with spikes and increased demand in traffic, it may be beneficial to host operational resource requirements on a private cloud infrastructure and utilise a public cloud platform when the demand for capacity increases.
This cloud bursting deployment model, where the workload primarily runs on an on-premises or private cloud infrastructure, uses public cloud when it ‘bursts’ for compute resources or storage, and then scales back once the peak demand has finished.
Hybrid cloud gives you the agility to adapt to rapidly changing requirements and dynamic workloads and offers a more cost-effective option as you will only pay for the resources when there is a demand for them. It can help ensure there is no downtime during high-volume data spikes as the public cloud environment can handle the demands in capacity for storage or compute resources.
Use Case 2: You need to separate critical workloads from less-sensitive workloads.
Your organisation would like to move forward with a ‘cloud first’ approach but has a significant legacy infrastructure that requires careful consideration when migrating business-critical applications and workloads. Moreover, you would like to take advantage of the agility and flexibility benefits that can be gained from migrating applications and data to the cloud, which can increase your speed to market by optimising IT performance.
Why hybrid cloud?
Migrating to a hybrid cloud approach can help your organisation separate critical workloads from less-sensitive workloads and offer a staggered approach to cloud adoption. With hybrid cloud, you can consider keeping specific data in a private cloud environment, ensuring existing security and compliance while moving less-critical application layers to a public cloud infrastructure to access scalability gains.
Hybrid cloud offers your organisation the best of both worlds as you can deploy private cloud to host core, sensitive or critical workloads in line with your organisation’s compliance and governance appetite and use public cloud to host and scale less-sensitive workloads such as test and development environments. By demonstrating compliance with operational and security processes with these ‘path-finder’ workloads in public cloud, you can proceed to migrate more critical or sensitive workloads at a pace your internal governance permits.
Use Case 3: You’ve got LOTS of data to process.
Your organisation collects a wealth of data through a host of data generating activities across a variety of sources and departments. Even with automated processes, it can take time to action and assess the quality of the data gathered and it may even be a challenge to ascertain what the data can be used for.
Why hybrid cloud?
Migrating data sets directly to a public cloud environment can be costly. Many organisations can start with consistent data sets in the public cloud, but these can quickly grow as the organisation grows and gathers more data, which could lead to escalating and unaccounted for costs to the cloud.
Typically, it is a more cost-effective option to migrate data to a private cloud environment with standard or local data-level processing and run big data analytics on a public cloud platform where you can access functionality such as analytics processing, archiving and compliance.
Use Case 4: You need to improve your backup and disaster recovery.
Organisations who operate legacy or on-premises infrastructure as part of their core technology need to protect themselves in the event of a disaster (natural disaster, internal/people error, cyber-attack etc). What will your organisation do if your systems are unavailable, leading to loss of access to your critical workloads and applications?
Why hybrid cloud?
You can reduce the risk and impact on your business operations by keeping your production environment in a private cloud infrastructure and your backup and recovery information in public cloud. This can be a more cost-effective option than storing backups at a separate on-premises location and you can scale your disaster recovery backups based on your organisation’s requirements. You also benefit with storing your backups ‘offsite’.
In the event of any unforeseen circumstances, you can ensure business continuity by quickly spinning up your backup or replicated environment from public cloud, ensuring your business experiences minimal disruption and remains operational. Some organisations also utilise the replication model as a precursor to a flip to running the system or service in production in public cloud, potentially allowing them to reduce or eliminate their on-premises footprint.
If you are considering a cloud migration project, speak to our experienced cloud experts who will be delighted to talk you through your options. You can also find out more about Brightsolid’s cloud services here.