Organizations continue the aggressive movement of their operations to the cloud. According to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report, 80% of enterprises are utilizing a hybrid cloud strategy.
Respondents to Flexera’s report estimate that 30% of their organizations’ cloud budgets are wasted. Managing cloud spend continues to be a self-designated top challenge among businesses of all sizes, and for good reason.
With cloud spend on the rise, it’s more important than ever to have high-level understanding on how you can optimize your hybrid architecture to reap full benefits and leave no money or technology on the table.
Understand What Hybrid Cloud Is (and What It Isn’t)
A hybrid cloud strategy is a complicated concept, despite how easy the myriad commercials make it appear. A critical first step to optimizing your cloud architecture is to understand what you’re working with -- and to be certain everyone is using the same terms in the same manner.
The simple answer: A hybrid cloud strategy integrates elements of multiple clouds (public and private, public and public, etc.) to deliver cost-efficient scalability, flexibility, configurability, and control. The exact configuration should be optimized for your Organization, so that it works better than only a public or private cloud would alone.
A hybrid cloud strategy should be your second choice because a single cloud solution doesn't meet your needs. There are cost and performance benefits, but there is also a significant trade-off in complexity, technological constraints, and flexibility. Successful hybrid cloud strategies are customized specifically for your business. For the strategy to be optimally effective, you must have a clear idea of your business’s desired goals. If you do not have a strategic technology plan to achieve these outcomes, you may end up among the number of companies that waste their cloud spend.
You must be able to answer the following questions:
There are numerous reasons why a business might pursue a hybrid strategy -- cost, control and performance being the most common.
A simple example: You are a fast-growing company delivering a platform where graphic designers and artists can store, edit, and share their work.
To ensure that you don’t lose users to long load times and unreliable access to their stored files, you may choose to store compute and storage in a data center to optimize performance and control. However, to access the best possible tools available without having to build them, you purchase AI, ML, and cloud-specific services from AWS and GCP.
