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Public cloud apps and services are great for shifting your non-differentiated business functions and infrastructure from expensive on-premise environments to low-cost off-site facilities managed by specialists you have no hope of keeping on staff.

Yet, if you’re facing shadow IT issues, demands to improve security and compliance, or the realization that you must prepare for a future in which success depends on your ability to differentiate your business , then you need something more than public cloud subscriptions.

As I’ve clarified in recent posts, cloud services generally provide the most resource-efficient way to satisfy your organization’s IT requirements — and usually are most effectively deployed via a hybrid cloud combining selected public cloud subscriptions with customized private cloud capabilities.

The arguments for hybrid clouds that you hear most often are, basically, defensive, powering the customizations that legacy environments depend on, protecting sensitive data, and boosting compliance.

Hybrid clouds are turning out to be the best way for enterprises to enable employees’ continued access to powerful on-demand public cloud resources without losing control over corporate data, corporate security, the ability to comply with legal requirements (e.g., ensuring employee and customer privacy), or the maintenance of legacy capabilities.

Public cloud + private cloud = necessity
After all, you’re not going to get line-of-business employees trying to do their jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible to cease their Shadow IT habits. They’ll invariably sign up for one of those quite excellent public cloud application services — whether you like it or not. Whether you even know it or not.

And odds are you can’t afford to devote your IT people’s limited time to building in-house replacements for such services. This makes a hybrid cloud architecture a necessity for most enterprises, since a hybrid cloud combines use of

Given how much cloud apps can boost your business agility while reducing maintenance, labor, and capital costs, chances are you’re spending a sizeable chunk of your IT budget on them (probably more than you realize).

You’re not alone. Industry watcher IDC predicts that in just a couple of years, at least half of all IT spending will be cloud-based, and by 2020, 60%-70% of all IT infrastructure, software, services, and technology spending will be cloud-based.

By any measure, a smoothly operating data network is a business essential; the typical unplanned network outage, which lasts an average of 95 minutes, now costs upwards of $740,000 — and more than 80% of that cost is due to business disruption, forsaken revenue, and loss of end-user productivity.

Yet every enterprise’s data network is different. So what does it take to get your unique network services requirements right?