According to Statista, 82% of all global enterprises currently (in the year 2023) have some kind of hybrid structure in place. The hybrid market is expected to reach a whopping 293.72 billion USD by the year 2030. This is not a trend that will be going anywhere anytime soon, so let’s start with the most important question: What is a hybrid cloud? Public, private, and hybrid cloud, what's the best for enterprises? And why enterprise hybrid cloud is the choice for the future?
Building an Optimal Hybrid Strategy - Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
When building an optimal cloud strategy, it’s important to consider all your options and make compromises and adjustments to get the best cloud solution for your particular business. Let’s explore the pros and cons of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions – and why enterprise hybrid cloud is the solution of choice for your optimal hybrid strategy.
Cloud is the trend and public cloud takes the lead
Three types of cloud are the go-to for keeping our businesses connected: Public, private, and hybrid. Private cloud can be built or hosted on-premise, and managed internally or by a third-party vendor. With a private cloud, all resources are dedicated to a single customer – you. Public cloud is a cloud service, run by a provider, and serving a range of customers simultaneously using SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and IaaS (infrastructure as a service). Hybrid cloud sits between private and public cloud, offering a mix of features from both types of cloud, and is often handled by a service provider. Of the three primary types of cloud service available, public cloud is currently leading the market, offering enterprises easy scalability and innovation, agility, and state-of-the-art technology.
Hyperscale providers are continuing to build distributed cloud and edge solutions that extend the public cloud’s reach into private and on-premise locations, addressing the needs of organizations relating to data sovereignty, workload portability and network latency. This fact, coupled with reliance on the public cloud by a majority of organizations during the pandemic, drove another year of double digital market growth in 2020.
Sid Nag, research VP at Gartner Inc.
Public Cloud is fantastic but not omnipotent
No single cloud option works for everyone. It’s simply not a one-size-fits-all market, and shouldn’t be treated like one. When considering implementing your optimal cloud solution, even with public cloud leading the market, consider working with a more hybrid or multi cloud strategy, to ensure your network gets the connectivity, security and scalability it needs for future growth. Even with increased security functions, public cloud is often managed externally, taking the control out of your hands, and often hitting you with surprise costs and network slowdowns.
Why Private & Managed Cloud still matters
There are still uses for private and managed clouds! Managed cloud services often provide better security and backup capacity than in-house IT services, as third parties have the staff and knowledge to streamline your cloud security. It’s their job to keep up with the most current threats and innovations, taking both the stress and control out of the hands of your IT professionals. Private cloud services are most often deployed in highly regulated verticals like finance or healthcare, or in technology companies or very large organizations that need the most insulated network security scheme. Managed cloud is less expensive to scale, as there is no required investment in hardware, software, or human administrators when the business grows. Private cloud simply gave you the maximum amount of control – until now.
The best of both worlds: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
Why not take the best elements of both public and private cloud, and implement a hybrid cloud platform? Deloitte projects that 90% of global enterprises will be going hybrid by 2022, and quoted a second survey predicting that 97% of IT administrators and managers were planning on using two or more clouds, due to resilience, security and compliance issues. No disrespect to public or private clouds, and all their benefits, but hybrid is the cloud of the future.
Hybrid cloud solutions create a connection between public and private cloud, helping manage spikes in demand or use, and reallocating computing resources as needed for business. Hybrid cloud makes it easier to move, create, and scale workloads or resources between public and private clouds, while it simultaneously ensures assets are safeguarded in the correct areas of the network. Compliance is a final area enabled by the hybrid cloud. As data usage and storage regulations shift, a hybrid cloud solution will allow you to easily move data between your private and public cloud, as needed to stay compliant.
A hybrid cloud strategy allows enterprises to utilize a combination of different environments to meet their computing, storage, and network needs. While there are many ways to create a hybrid cloud environment by making use of any mix of public cloud services, private cloud services, on-premises infrastructure, and third-party services, blending on-prem and public clouds is one of the most common choices.
Build an enterprise hybrid cloud that leverages the strengths of both public and private clouds to meet your specific needs. This strategy ensures that your organization can adapt in real time to changing demands and conditions, providing the flexibility and resilience required for modern business operations.
What are the benefits of using a hybrid cloud for enterprises?
To build enterprise applications, you need to go cloud native. This means choosing a public cloud environment or private cloud infrastructure. Let’s say you have a client operating within the FinTech space that is developing a financial solution on big data analysis. In such a case, you would need on-premise data centers, and computing environments, for your financial services applications. You would also be concerned about cloud security. As such, you may be faced with deciding to choose between private and public cloud.
Business critical applications require a significant amount of thought and serious consideration. In the above case, both private and public cloud infrastructures have their advantages. However, hybrid cloud infrastructure blends the benefits of both infrastructures. Perhaps the greatest benefit of hybrid cloud strategies for enterprises is that they allow for a cloud-smart approach. This means that enterprises can choose which environment best meets their needs and will support and benefit them long term. The benefits for organizations that opt for an enterprise hybrid cloud solution include:
Governance and Compliance
As has been the case with several Sangfor customers, many organizations must follow compliance to ensure that policies and procedures are being met. In many industries where sensitive data is attained and utilized, there is strict compliance surrounding data security. By implementing a hybrid strategy, organizations can select environments and solutions that best meet their data security needs, be it on-premises data storage or a private cloud. Hybrid cloud strategies allow enterprises to fulfill their compliance requirements and still have the option of utilizing other environments for their less restrictive or non-compliance-based needs.
Remote-work Supportive
Research compiled by data scientists at Ladders in 2021 showed that in 2022, 25% of all jobs in the United States would be remote, while an Owl Labs study found that 16% of enterprises globally are fully remote. While Covid-19 caused a rise in remote work trends, many enterprises have maintained remote, and hybrid work even afterward. For businesses that have or will adapt to this trend, hybrid cloud strategies make it possible for systems to be accessed by employees from anywhere. With a hybrid cloud strategy, work out-of-office can be maintained.
Scalability and Resource Management
Enterprises that use cloud environments have the benefit of scaling as they need. Business needs change and workload demands fluctuate. This means that subsequently, the infrastructure needed to meet those demands may increase or decrease. Cloud vendors work on a pay-as-you-go and per-need basis, allowing you to change your subscription as necessary without limitations or the need to upgrade your infrastructure. This means you can enjoy the benefits of resources on-demand without delay.
Enterprises can also plan their budgets around what resources they need and which environments they can afford to meet those needs. While for some enterprises, cloud-first solutions are cost-effective in the long run, this is not always the case for others. An enterprise hybrid cloud solution allows businesses to use the solution that best fits their budget as the business grows, leading to significant cost savings.
Legacy-application Friendly
Legacy applications are sometimes what stop enterprises heavily reliant on them from moving to the cloud. With a hybrid cloud, organizations can use the cloud to upgrade or rebuild their legacy applications should they wish to, or simply leave them should they not. This is one of the many ways in which hybrid cloud solutions provide flexibility.
Challenges of using an enterprise hybrid cloud
While enterprise hybrid cloud solutions offer numerous benefits, they also come with several challenges that organizations must address:
- Complexity: Managing and integrating multiple cloud environments can be complex and require specialized skills.
- Security: Ensuring consistent security policies and practices across both public and private clouds can be challenging.
- Compliance: Meeting regulatory and compliance requirements across different environments can be difficult.
- Cost Management: Tracking and optimizing costs across multiple cloud platforms can be complicated.
- Data Integration: Seamlessly integrating and managing data between on-premises and cloud environments can be problematic.
- Performance: Ensuring consistent performance and minimizing latency across hybrid environments can be tough.
- Vendor Lock-in: Avoiding dependency on a single cloud provider while maintaining flexibility can be challenging.
- Interoperability: Ensuring different cloud services and platforms work together smoothly can be difficult.
- Monitoring and Management: Maintaining visibility and control over resources and applications across hybrid environments requires robust tools and processes.
Addressing these challenges requires careful planning, robust management tools, and a clear strategy.
Enterprise hybrid cloud vendors
Knowing how to choose the right hybrid cloud vendor is the first and most important stepping stone in developing a hybrid cloud strategy that meets your business’s needs.
Sangfor provides a wide range of managed cloud services that are tailored to meet the computing needs of each enterprise. Below is a list of our top five recommended enterprise hybrid cloud providers:
- Sangfor Hybrid Cloud
- IBM
- Microsoft Azure Stack
- AWS Outpost
- Google Cloud Anthos
Choosing a provider that has the experience and can provide the above benefits of a hybrid cloud strategy is important. A good provider can grow your enterprise and bring you closer to your business goals, while the wrong one can set you back. With that being said, it is advisable to strategize on determining how your enterprise will make its final choice to meet all its needs.
Sangfor Hybrid Cloud Solution
Sangfor Hybrid Cloud is built on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), combining compute, storage, virtualization, and security for simple deployment, ease of management, and cutting-edge security. In the whiteboard video below, we will take a deeper look at Sangfor Hybrid Cloud architecture, its use cases, and why it is the perfect solution for your digital transformation (DX).
Sangfor Customers who implemented enterprise hybrid cloud using HCI
Many enterprises in varying industries have deployed Sangfor’s hybrid cloud using HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure). Sangfor HCI combines computing, security, network, and storage solutions onto a single stack, and uses a wide range of Sangfor products to meet these needs. Our customers include PT JFE Steel Galvanizing Indonesia, the only high-quality galvanized steel manufacturer in Indonesia; Julong Group Indonesia, a palm oil manufacturer, and Malaysia’s Ministry of Rural Development (KPLB - Kementerian Pembangunan Luar Bandar). These are three organizations in the manufacturing and government sectors that have adopted Sangfor HCI as part of their cloud architecture.
Each of the above organizations faced challenges with their previous service providers before moving to Sangfor. Sangfor was able to deploy Sangfor HCI to meet their needs, providing a reliable, flexible, and secure infrastructure for their data protection, applications, security requirements, backup needs, and more, ensuring business continuity
Final thoughts about enterprise hybrid cloud
A hybrid cloud solution can provide many benefits to an organization that will propel its digital transformation and accommodate all enterprise demands. It is a great way to approach a cloud-smart strategy and a driver of sustainable development. While it is a transition that needs to be approached with care and patience, it stands to boost performance and ease workload demands on independent enterprises looking for a flexible strategy.
Sangfor’s cloud solutions are reliable, high-performing, and easy to use, simplifying the enterprise journey to hybrid cloud, using solutions such as managed cloud services. Contact us to learn more about cloud products, services, and solutions available for your businesses.
