3 benefits of moving to a managed hybrid cloud

According to a recent UBS Evidence Lab study, 60 percent of IT administrators and CIOs surveyed agreed that hybrid solutions make the most sense. And data from a recent Synergy report said that spending on private and hybrid cloud services is growing at 45 percent per year. With a fully managed hybrid cloud, companies get all the benefits without the challenges and stress of maintaining it themselves. Below are a few reasons why multi-cloud strategies are becoming so popular.

Core benefits of moving to a hybrid cloud

1. A hybrid solution gives you the ability to divide up your application into different parts (such as containers) and put them where they run best, essentially scaling your resources in the most appropriate way for them. For example, if you need a low latency, high performance application, a private cloud might be your best choice. If you need to test your application or are running a program with varying peaks in demand, it might be better supported in the public cloud. No matter which cloud you’re in, if you have the right partner, you don’t have to worry about the hardware and can avoid an expensive hardware refresh and the CAPEX associated with it.
2. A hybrid cloud also lets a company place its data where compliance or security requirements, such as PCI or HIPAA, dictate. For those in the healthcare or financial industries, this factor is extremely important when choosing a cloud strategy.
3. Better managed costs: When you’re maximizing the efficiency of the cloud, it’s only natural that substantial cost savings will follow. When you use a hybrid solution, you’re taking advantage of the best the public and private clouds have to offer. When you use a managed hybrid service, your cloud services become integrated with each other so you can see exactly how much you’re spending without looking at multiple bills. RightScale has estimated cloud waste spend to be 15 percent more than organizations budgeted for. This underestimation is making companies sit up and take notice of their cloud spend, which makes a managed hybrid solution very appealing.

What’s the difference between hybrid cloud and hybrid IT?

Hybrid cloud, as it might be guessed, only touches upon the multiple uses of the cloud. But of course, there’s a lot more to IT than cloud services. IT includes backup, disaster recovery or colocation/bare metal hardware from legacy systems. Some applications are tedious and complex to move into the cloud, ultimately taking more time and money that it’s worth to keep them on a dedicated server.

Hybrid IT means using all of these services along with your cloud strategy to form a complete IT solution. Take that a step further, and managed hybrid IT is using a single provider or providers to handle all of your IT needs, whether that’s disaster recovery, cloud, backup, or colocation.  In the end, it’s all about flexibility and transparency, where you can easily manage each service you purchase.

Hybrid cloud offers many benefits to organizations, including a better ability to scale specific workloads and place their data in the best environment for them, which means more options. With a fully managed hybrid solution, businesses can reap the benefits of hybrid without the challenges of deploying and maintaining the infrastructure. As Jim Comfort of IBM says, “Organizations not only need to support the shift to hybrid, but also look for ways to exploit it in order to succeed, grow, and beat their competition.”