Why your business needs to adopt hybrid cloud

If you’re an IT leader in the process of setting a cloud first strategy for your company, you will eventually run into questions regarding hybrid cloud adoption. What are the core advantages of hybrid cloud? Is it secure? Will that change result in business value that exceeds the investment?

Once used mostly by early adopters, hybrid cloud has already become the mainstream choice for companies undergoing a digital transformation. According to Cisco’s 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends survey of 2,500 IT leaders in 13 countries, 82% have adopted the hybrid cloud, with 47% deploying two to three public clouds. Only 8% reported that they were using a single cloud provider.

To help you begin your journey to a hybrid cloud environment, this article will discuss the reasons for adopting hybrid cloud and the advantages that it offers. 

What is hybrid cloud?

A hybrid cloud is an IT environment that incorporates a mix of cloud resources such as a private cloud, a public cloud like GCP, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services (AWS), and in some cases, an on-premises data center (which is not cloud-based). There are three main kinds of hybrid cloud environments:

1. Public cloud / private cloud 
2. Public cloud / on-premises    
3. Private cloud / on-premises

There is no one-size-fits all hybrid cloud solution – businesses need to decide which combination is the best for their operations. Some companies might have two public clouds with on-prem, while others might use one private cloud, one public cloud, and no on-prem.

Why businesses are adopting hybrid cloud

Every business has its own reasons for adopting hybrid cloud, but there are several situations that we as a cloud provider usually encounter: 

• The business needs to lower the TCO of its IT environment 
• The business needs an easier transition for its cloud migration 
• The business wishes to avoid the limitations of vendor lock-in  
• The business needs an IT upgrade to meet customer expectations 

Five advantages to hybrid cloud

There are in fact more advantages to hybrid cloud than we list here, but we will focus on the more prominent ones: 

Flexibility and scalability

The biggest advantage to combining different types of clouds is that you have an environment that is instantly ready to adapt to the changing demands of your business. Different workloads can sit in the cloud resources best suited to them. The Cisco report showed that over half of respondents (53%) switch workloads every week between on and off-premises. 

For example, workloads relating to current projects might belong in your public cloud for quick access by remote team members, whereas secure data with specific governance and regulation might be a better fit for your on-premises servers. And having access to multiple public clouds such as GCP or AWS allows you to switch between their different services to accommodate your changing needs as your business grows.    

Better security and compliance

Security is always a top concern for IT leaders adopting new cloud technologies. Hybrid cloud offers you the ability to choose which servers and network devices to restrict access to. You can also set up your devices and cloud servers on a private network.

Additionally, this level of control also helps to make sure you are in compliance with your country’s data protection and localization laws, such as The Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) in Singapore. Hybrid cloud allows businesses to store their data in public clouds that are already in compliance with regional standards, skirting the need to use or build data centers in other countries.  

Lower costs on infrastructure management

Controlling cloud costs also becomes much easier in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. A 451 Research survey of businesses in 10 regions shows that the average possible savings of using multiple cloud providers was 45%. This relates to the above-mentioned flexibility, since a hybrid cloud environment can adjust IT resource utilization for peak and off-peak usage times by customers, which leads to more efficient IT spend.   

Remote accessibility

Remote work has already become the norm, with most companies integrating remote or at least hybrid work practices into their operations. Data and applications that are stored on-premises will be difficult to access for off-site employees and create huge lag for team members in other countries. Data and applications hosted in a public cloud, however, can be easily accessed by remote employees with the proper authorization.     

Enable innovation

In order to truly innovate, your company’s developers need access to the most advanced tools available. According to the Cisco report, close to half (47%) of CloudOps and DevOps respondents say that a “cloud first” mandate is the tipping point for changing development processes and tools. The ability to nimbly switch between cloud resources without IT constraints frees up developers’ mental space to develop, test, and deploy new applications and services quickly. 

CloudMile can guide you set up your hybrid cloud infrastructure

Making the transition to a hybrid cloud architecture is a complex process, which is why we strongly recommend engaging a qualified cloud partner to guide you on this journey.  CloudMile is a Google Cloud certified partner and a leading Google Cloud partner in Asia. We can be there at every step of the process and make sure customers are adopting the most advanced and effective tools. This includes solutions such as Anthos by Google Cloud, a managed platform for all your application deployments, both traditional as well as cloud native.