With cloud technology taking over most of the IT services, the quest to improve cloud offerings and services has increased over the time to fuel the growing needs of IT teams and the most significant among them being Hybrid Cloud infrastructure.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid Cloud uses a combination of on-premises infrastructure and public cloud or private cloud computing. Moreover, hybrid cloud is the end-to-end orchestration among on-premise and multi-cloud-based infrastructure and services. For example, your data center could be located on-premise, but workflows require information from your data center to be accessible via public or private cloud resources.

Leveraging the cloud resources has become a necessity for modern businesses. As mainframes and on-premises infrastructure provide crucial benefits that can’t be achieved in the cloud, many organizations are taking a hybrid-IT approach. Enterprises see hybrid cloud offering as the best of both worlds, giving them public cloud resources on tap to meet new and fluctuating business demands, while continuing to run legacy and mission-critical workloads in private cloud data centers.

Why is Hybrid Cloud Management Important?

Hybrid Cloud management makes efficient use of public cloud hardware resources in data center administration or web hosting. Hybrid Cloud management permits IT professionals in complex business organizations to procure the lowest costs on hardware resources through competitive bidding across platforms. This avoids vendor lock-in that can lead to higher pricing and waste.

Cloud Computing industry is evolving at a lightning speed with new trends and developments emerging every year. However, it has become quite evident that the

Hybrid Cloud will be the defacto standard for enterprises.

Combining the higher security for mission-critical applications that comes with private cloud with the flexibility and scalability offered by public cloud, hybrid cloud promises organizations the best of the both worlds. A 2019 report by Flexera found that enterprises with a Hybrid Cloud strategy (combining public and private clouds) grew to 58% in 2019 from 51% in 2018.

Innovations in Hybrid Cloud Management

Major cloud service providers foresaw these trends and have been innovating constantly to enable enterprises with flexibility to leverage on-premise infrastructure and combine the best services across multiple clouds.

• Google’s Cloud Services Platform Anthos allows managing hybrid clouds that span on-premises data centers and multiple clouds such as AWS and Azure. With Anthos, Google offers a single managed service that allows to manage and deploy workloads across clouds, all without having to worry about the different environments and APIs.
• Microsoft Azure Arc offers similar hybrid cloud offerings to support both on-premises infrastructure and multi cloud services.
• Amazon Web Services provides hybrid cloud management with AWS Outposts to help customers bridge the gap between on-premise and AWS cloud workloads. However, it does not support the multi-cloud management like Google and Azure.

Advantages of Implementing a Successful Hybrid Cloud Management

Some key benefits of establishing an effective Hybrid cloud management system can be:

• Gain Visibility – In a Multi-cloud environment, it is imperative to obtain real-time insights across multiple verticals of the organization in the multi-cloud environment. The nature of insights may be operational concerns, gathering information on underutilized assets, making effective resource distribution, etc. A good Hybrid Cloud Management system can fill up all such voids and provide felicitous data to optimize all resources efficiently.
• Control IT Spend – The budget limits for various projects can be specified and controlled by a reliable hybrid cloud management system. Since the hybrid cloud management systems provide real-time insights into multiple the verticals of the organization it is relatively simple to ensure visibility into budgeting and controlling of various cloud resources at a granular level.
• Improve Productivity – Hybrid cloud management systems enable easy access to cloud resources for both the developers and the end-users. This on-demand self-service facilitation into key resources, empowers users to be more efficient and productive and tedious tasks such as resizing and reclaiming of assets can be automated through an efficient hybrid cloud management system.

And so, it becomes imperative to have a Hybrid Cloud solution which helps not only to gain insights, but also improves productivity. Hybrid Cloud management is a process as well as a platform to manage infrastructure at scale to meet the growing needs of enterprises.

Conclusion

Given the magnitude of services and ease of workflow provided, the Hybrid Cloud has emerged as one of the most sought-after implementation models that will single-handedly drive the succession of the ever-growing, reliable and efficient cloud industry. This progressing trend is corroborated by market research conducted by Gartner, which reveals that Worldwide infrastructure as a service Public Cloud Services Market Grew 31.3% in 2018 and is still rising at steady pace.

Gartner predicts that, by 2021, 90% of global enterprise customers will adopt a Hybrid Cloud approach as Enterprises want to take full advantage of best-of-breed solutions and will therefore be working with one or more cloud service providers.

SBP’s Cloud solutions for your organization can optimize your cloud investment strategy to reap desired outcomes.

Reach out to us and learn more about how you can make the best out of your Hybrid infrastructure with a cloud management platform.