Too often when you’re in the market for a new or upgraded IT capability, it’s by necessity, because your operations have been thrown into crisis by some sort of failure and you need a solution now. In resolving disaster recovery and business continuity crises, you’ll likely end up with an ‘as a service’ solution, since you can get it up and running quickly with little or no CapEx. And, especially if you’re in crisis, you may think all DRaaS solutions
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.
Much of the appeal of cloud services lies in their ability to mask the complexity of the information technologies we all depend on.
Thus, as your clients’ employees sign on to public clouds, their IT staffs must respond with hybrid cloud solutions that address the resulting shadow IT, security, and compliance issues.
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
Ever ask your clients how many public cloud services they use? Odds are the number is higher than even the most senior tech guy knows.
In fact, the appeal of low-cost, easy-to-use, feature-rich public cloud services is so universal that by 2020, cloud will claim two-thirds of all IT infrastructure, software, services, and technology spending . By then, cloud-related communication will account for more than 80% of total data center traffic .
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.
