28 Jan The Road to Cloud Is a Hybrid One
The benefits of using the cloud are undeniable—from reduced infrastructure costs and license fees to increased scalability and agility. But, while every company has some variation of a cloud strategy on their roadmap, the move to the cloud is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. Most often, it’s a gradual implementation because some processes must still run on-premises or in a private cloud, while others can more easily and compliantly be supported in the public cloud.
Organizations are becoming more and more comfortable with a hybrid model because it makes good business sense—combining the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud with the option to keep more complex applications on-premises. There are many reasons why businesses may want to combine on-premises and cloud instances, from specific policies relating to where data can be stored, to having previously purchased on-premises solutions, to a future-focused strategy that integrates more and more cloud opportunities. In fact, a 2014 report by Infonetics Research confirms that hybrid cloud is becoming the “new normal” as adoption among enterprises was expected to more than double by 2015.
Hybrid Is the New Normal
This new normal is your new challenge: managing a hybrid environment that consists of private and public clouds and on-premises IT infrastructures. No longer are you responsible for just managing on-premises solutions within your own borders. Now you have to manage applications across the cloud as well. To effectively meet this challenge, you’ll need visibility into all of the pieces of this increasingly diverse environment.
Visibility Into the Hybrid Environment
Visibility across on-premises and cloud deployments is the key to navigating the shifting tide of IT management in the hybrid world because you cannot manage what you cannot see. You’ll need visibility across the environment to gain an understanding of cloud workloads and to ensure service levels, security and compliance.