What Arethe Practical Steps on the Hybrid Cloud Service Journey?

So will hybrid cloud, which uses a mix of on-premise, private cloud and public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms, deliver real benefits?

What arethe practical steps on the hybrid cloud service journey?

Companies must realise cloud is not just a ‘fashion statement’ and is here to stay. The challenge here is adopting cloud at scale can also be a risky, and at times, daunting process. However, without implementing cloud at scale, organisations will never experience the true impact, value, or even lower overheads it can offer.

If businesses wish to introduce cloud into their IT infrastructures, then it is recommended to start small and scale up over time. The solution here is to compromise. Gradually, businesses should take the steps to adopt cloud for scale, time to value and flexibility, whilst retaining valuable assets in the safety of the company’s current IT infrastructure. This configuration is commonly known as hybrid cloud.

Just like hybrid cars that use electricity and petrol when power is low, hybrid cloud brings two technologies together to support each other. This allows IT teams to use on-premise systems for some tasks and cloud for others.

However, one of the most important steps organisations need to remember is to not just look at the typical hybrid cloud definition, which tends to look solely at the infrastructure involved. Running server workloads, split between on-premise and cloud platforms, is a difficult and complex system with many moving parts that need to be managed well, and should be done to suit each individual businesses’ needs.

Instead, looking at hybrid cloud platforms from a Line of Business (LOB) perspective, many services can be placed in the cloud. HR, Payroll, Customer Management Systems, Marketing and Social Media all have desirable cloud solutions, and when integrated with on-premise applications, become very productive with quicker time to value and lower overall costs.