Hybrid cloud is set to be one of the biggest, most valuable technology opportunities for enterprises in 2017 and looking ahead over the next few years. To take advantage of this opportunity enterprises must apply the same principles they utilise in maintaining multiple data centres to data storage in the cloud – whereby a single cloud will no longer suffice.
The hybrid cloud trend has been confirmed by leading analyst firms, with IDC predicting organisations will require a mainly cloud-based IT environment by 2019 and 451 Research claiming that public storage spend will double in the next two years as demand for on-premise storage declines.
Why Hybrid?
Hybrid is gaining in popularity as it offers not only the flexibility and data deployment benefits of public cloud, but also provides the security assurance of on-premises, private cloud – effectively giving businesses the best of both worlds. This means organisations can now store their most important or sensitive data on the private cloud, while storing other resources on public networks.
The move towards hybrid cloud makes the integrity of data and services a major priority for enterprises. It will therefore be important to get the right mix of on-premise and various as-a-service offerings, to ensure data is always available and synchronised across multiple platforms.
Guarantee data availability
It is critical that availability is put at the forefront of any digital transformation or hybrid cloud strategy. This will ensure that when applications and workloads are being moved across various infrastructures there’s a backup and disaster recovery plan in place to guarantee that downtime is not an issue.
However, our research finds that the majority off businesses are struggling to achieve this. The Veeam 2016 Availability Report found that, despite investing in their data centres, 82% of businesses admit suffering an availability gap between how fast they can recover applications and how fast they need applications to be recovered. They are therefore unable to meet end-users’ requirements for an always-on business.
Time to put hybrid into action
Hybrid cloud needs to be used in a way that benefits the individual organisation, and its workloads. For example, it’s particularly beneficial to a university as it can choose to move some workloads to the public cloud at particularly busy times during the year, such as A-Level results day and clearing when they have to deal with a vast influx of data that its on-premise setup may not be able to handle.
It is no longer acceptable for downtime to affect any service and, while the next few years will bring plenty of uncertainties, it’s guaranteed that the importance of data availability — anywhere, anytime — will only increase. Enterprises must have a clear cloud strategy in place before they fully invest in cloud infrastructure. At the core of this is ensuring data and information is available at all times.
