In today’s increasingly digital world, a business’s cloud computing strategy is also important. While cloud platforms have been rapidly expanding for several years, businesses are using different platforms for different business processes. Business applications that work across a combination of different environments are seeing gains in scalability, flexibility, cost control, and security. In this article, we at Global IT will focus on 5 benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud approach.
The infrastructure needs of the applications that organizations make available both on-premises and for their end users are differentiating. Cloud platforms, which have been on the rise in recent years and allow businesses to carry out their business processes independently of time and space, are also diversifying according to the size of the organization.
For different business components such as storage, computing, networking, cloud system providers that offer different advantages are preferred. The interconnectedness of these networks is important for business processes not to be disrupted and to fully achieve the expected gains from digital transformation. Critical workloads that are not intended to be moved to service providers’ data centers for reasons such as security also need to be connected to the company’s roof system in some way.
All of these needs are creating a new approach called hybrid cloud. Today, the platforms of different cloud service providers are interconnected.
This returns to businesses as different gains. As Global IT, in this article, we will first touch on the definition of hybrid cloud. Next, we’ll outline the benefits this approach offers to businesses.
What is Hybrid Cloud?
According to Google, hybrid cloud is the cloud where applications run in a combination of different environments. Hybrid cloud computing approaches are preferred by many businesses today. Because businesses cannot trust the public cloud, which is open to everyone, enough.
Private cloud systems, which are only available to companies, are preferred for cost-limited business units due to investment costs. As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, regardless of the preferences of the enterprises, these different systems need to be able to work together.
The hybrid cloud approach allows businesses that leverage public cloud platforms like Google Cloud to continue using private clouds and on-premises servers. In this respect, it stands out as one of the most common infrastructure installations today. According to the State of the Cloud 2022 report by Flexera , four out of 5 enterprises prefer a hybrid approach, which envisages the combination of public and private clouds.
What Are the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud?
As organizations move the vast majority of their workloads year after year to public clouds from providers like Google Cloud, processes that need to stay on-premises are stored in private cloud solutions. Connecting these different cloud platforms through a bridge provides businesses with the following benefits:
1. Cost control: We have previously mentioned that businesses should be cautious about workloads and services that may include their employees’ information, their company’s trade secrets and financials. A private cloud is deployed with data center infrastructure controlled and operated by the organization. Still, investing capital, equipment and capabilities is required to deploy, maintain and maintain these platforms.
2. While private cloud structures can decouple local resources in a cloud-platform-like fashion, they still offer a limited environment from the possibilities of public clouds. When high demands on local workloads overwhelm a business’s own systems, it’s preferable to distribute that pressure to additional resources in the public cloud.
3. As the company grows, scaling private cloud systems will create additional costs, so using hybrid cloud systems as support that offer scalable platforms provides businesses with a cost advantage. This allows businesses to locate only their critical business processes in the private cloud and use public clouds for other workloads. This gives them more control over the budgets they spend on technology infrastructure.
4. Resilience and scalability: In an environment where crises are commonplace and extraordinary events compromise business processes at unexpected times, concepts such as flexibility, resilience and agility stand out for businesses. Considering that the main value promises of cloud platforms are agility, flexibility and scalability, it can be seen that private clouds, which create additional costs to maintain and deploy, are insufficient to meet these promises.
5. Public clouds, by contrast, can often scale depending on usage. Google’s cloud platform, for example, grows or shrinks its customers’ cloud platforms based on the volume of their workloads to optimize business resources. Adopting a hybrid approach facilitates the manageability of business processes where the need for performance increases periodically.
6. Security: Cyberattacks threaten businesses of all sizes today. PwC’s According to the 2022 edition of the Digital Trust Survey, cyberattacks are projected to set new records by the end of this year. Even being exposed to an attack that will cause a small disruption in business processes can create vital consequences.
7. When it comes to using public clouds, businesses naturally rely on infrastructure providers. Users can’t see the entire infrastructure in the public cloud and have full control. Although rare, cloud service providers such as Google, which take full responsibility for self-induced problems, generally do not accept responsibility for cyber attacks on businesses.
8. The best way to protect data at this point is to keep the sensitive ones on-premises. On the other hand, hybrid cloud providers also have a responsibility to secure the bridge connecting the private and public cloud.
9. Compliance: Data security is one of the topics on the agenda of governments as well as companies. Public cloud systems keep companies’ data in data centers located anywhere in the world. However, issues such as where companies store data and run computing workloads can change as required by countries’ regulatory laws.
10. Considering that multinational companies have headquarters in different parts of the world and are therefore subject to more than one regulation, it becomes difficult for roof structures to use public cloud systems. Organizations that are required to comply with regulations in the countries they are subject to in order to do business are able to do so with a hybrid cloud approach.
11. For example, a business can store its users’ personal data in the private cloud in the country where it is located. Where permitted by law, public cloud solutions can be used to process this data. In this way, business continuity in accordance with the legislation is ensured.
12. Standardization: The hybrid cloud approach theoretically encourages greater standardization in IT management practices. Workloads and data stored in private and public clouds use both platforms, so they need to have defined and defined counterparts on each platform. With a hybrid cloud approach, IT teams are becoming more sensitive to the challenges of integrating private and public work environments. Thus, digital transformation processes are designed with the needs that may arise in the future in mind.
Explore the Possibilities of Hybrid Cloud with Global IT
In October 2021, Google announced its portfolio of hybrid cloud services at its annual customer conference, Google Cloud Next. With the Anthossolution, which allows managing a hybrid cloud approach, the company has also begun to offer solutions for customers who may have private workloads that don’t quite fit the public cloud.
By simplifying the hybrid experience and prioritizing security while doing so, Google Cloud provides the ability to run applications across on-premises and multi-cloud platforms with a consistent Kubernetes experience. With Anthos, Google promises companies a reliable and efficient way to run their Kubernetes clusters in the cloud of their choice, and counts Google Kubernetes Engine among the associated services for running containerized applications.
Founded in 2006 and focusing exclusively on Google products and services ever since, Global IT is able to ensure your smooth transition to a hybrid cloud approach as Google’s oldest and only Cloud Partner in Turkey. Offering solutions focused on modernization of e-commerce, infrastructure modernization, disaster recovery, data cloud, application modernization, artificial intelligence, cloud check-up, database and security, Global IT proves its competence especially with its references operating in the retail sector such as Trendyol, N11, Getir and Hepsiburada.
Global IT, which can customize Google’s Cloud Platform and Anthos to the needs of businesses of all sizes, makes it possible to achieve up to 4.8 times return on investment in 3 years. You can visit this link to explore Google services and Anthos that Global IT is the provider of. If you want to know what we can do for you, you can fill out the contact form at the bottom of this post.