How Hybrid Cloud Computing is Beneficial for Entrepreneurs
Hybrid cloud computing is changing the business world as we know it today. This is especially true for entrepreneurs. Learn how they're benefiting from it.
Some experts believe that by 2020 90% of all businesses will adopt hybrid infrastructure management. This should come as no surprise since hybrid environments are able to optimize your systems based on your company’s unique requirements. In turn, this will help to accelerate the delivery of services and applications.
With this in mind, it’s important to understand that the hybrid cloud computing environment looks different for every business. The one thing that it does have in common though is the fact that it’s a combination of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services. How your business sets this up will define your connectivity and orchestration between the two platforms.
By taking this approach to cloud services you’ll have the broadest choices so you can maintain an IT state that makes great sense for your business. Once set up this will be translated in terms of increased cost reductions, control, flexibility, agility, accessibility, and innovation. These are all things that will spur your organization’s growth and competitiveness. They’re also things you’ll want to have a better understanding of in regard to how they relate to your business.
Flexibility and Scalability
Smart Data Collective says one of the best things about these public systems is that they make it so your data is easily available for you to access from anywhere. This isn’t true when you’re using a private cloud, but this type of hosting facilitates security compliant applications. Nevertheless, both these systems will ensure that your business has the flexibility it needs when it comes to for both security and mobility.
When you create your own hybrid model here, you’ll be able to ensure its portability. You’ll be able to move applications and data across clouds or your data centre without much, if any, downtime. This is great because it means that you won’t disrupt your employees or your customers. These are just a few of the many benefits of a hybrid cloud. Another great benefit you don’t want to overlook the ability to scale your workloads since you can easily scale your resources up or down depending on your needs – adding new hardware, software, and services whenever needed.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Another important factor for your business is having great uptime for its IT resources and data access. With cloud technology, your business can maximize the growth, high availability, disaster recovery, and backup services. Once in the cloud, your data is merely a replica, which means that it remains inactive unless you need it. Not only does this make it more readily available, but it does so at a lower cost.
Collaborative
Cloud solutions are growing in popularity because there are many benefits to its use. Since most companies (e.g. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle) already have their own private cloud networks, it’s easier to collaborate with them, reduce storage costs, and enhance scalable capacity. This is a trend you’ll also want to leverage.
Innovation
As an entrepreneur, you need to constantly be innovating so you can stay ahead of your competition. The research and development that’s necessary here cost time and money. You’ll also need new IT infrastructure. This can be “scary” because if your idea doesn’t succeed, you’ve wasted your resources. When you use a hybrid cloud for this you have more ability to test new ideas and offer experimental services to see how successful they are. You’ll also be able to install a small business phone system that will further help with your research and development. All of this is made possible without investing a lot of money in computing infrastructure that becomes nothing more than a waste if your plan or idea doesn’t work.
Cost-effective
Rutter Net says that by 2025 we’ll be producing 163 zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes). As this data increases, in-house data centres are also becoming more expensive to provide and maintain. Most businesses would love to find a way to decrease their capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OPEX) when it comes to hardware and personnel. The best way to do this is to use the public cloud to downsize one or more of their data centres. By creating a hybrid cloud computing model you’ll give your businesses the power to choose where applications and workloads can reside based on where they fit the best. How much money you’ll save will depend on your specific technological, operational, and business goals here.
Affordability
About 54% of executives who use a hybrid cloud say they started doing so because it cost them less to use this technology. Of course, it’s important to understand that a public cloud is typically more affordable than a private cloud. With a hybrid cloud, you can also balance your needs in a way that’s cost-effective. This is because you have the option to only pay for the extra cloud space you use instead of spending money on massive infrastructure and employing maintenance staff. The reason this is great for your business is that you can choose what you want to move to the cloud and what you want to maintain “in-house.” You’ll pay a simple, cost-effective monthly fee structure associated and adjust the size of your cloud services based on your customers’ demands or your business’ size instead of always being concerned about investing money in maintaining an in-house system – freeing most business’ budget up by as much as 24%. Doing so will free up more funds you can use on other projects that will help propel your business forward.
Security and Compliance
One of the biggest challenges businesses who use the public cloud face today has to do with keeping their data and applications secure. This is because some of your applications and sensitive data will need a high level of security than others. These are things you’ll want to store in a private cloud. You can then use the public cloud for added capacity when you need it and for storing information you need for your daily operations. Your data will remain safe since it’s hosted internally and accessed through encrypted means that offers complete data security. As such, the hybrid cloud lets you keep your customers’ data on a dedicated server so you can leverage the cloud’s high performance and ensure that you’re operating in an agile and secure environment.