Using private and public clouds to build scalable hybrid infrastructures has long been the aspiration of much of the technology industry. This is demonstrated by the results of the annual study ‘Enterprise Cloud Index’, which reflects this trend during the last three years and which in 2020 even places at 86% the number of companies that consider it their ideal model, affirming almost half of them (49%) who expect to have adopted it in the next three to five years.
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Why is this change so important?
Because the technology behind the large public clouds of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft is based on the same principles as that of hyper-converged infrastructures. In addition, these infrastructures are now not only available to everyone and are a way to reduce costs and technical complexity, but are also a key element in building scalable and easy-to-manage private clouds as part of a hybrid model.
Looking at these numbers in isolation, someone might think that the main driver of change is financial. In fact, in data centers, for example, there are obvious cost savings by replacing traditional complex servers and storage networks with HCI models. It’s much easier to use and offers cloud-like scalability. In addition, it is also possible to save some money by moving from a data center associated with Capex financing to an Opex model of public cloud platforms.
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However, the reality is that costs are no longer the main concern when choosing the technological infrastructure for the company. The study shows that when companies were asked about the main reasons that motivated the change, only a quarter (27%) mentioned cost savings as the most important. Most did so to gain more flexibility to meet their business goals (55%), improve customer support (46%), support employees who were working remotely (46%), or improve data security and regulatory compliance (40%).
In theory, we could achieve any of these goals by simply migrating to hyper-converged infrastructures in the data center. Or even building a private cloud or working with public clouds. So why this growing trend towards the hybrid cloud?
Businesses consistently express their desire to be able to run the workloads on the infrastructure that best suits them at all times.
The answer to this question is not complicated: because companies need to focus on achieving the best business results quickly, easily, and, which is crucial today, without the limitations of a specific technology model. As previous studies have also shown, companies consistently express their desire to be able to run the workloads on the infrastructure that best suits them at the time. Either to improve security, quickly incorporate new applications, land in new markets with different regulations, etc. What they need is the ability to move their workloads dynamically, based not only on costs, but also on time-to-market, peak demand, and other variables.
It is becoming increasingly clear that improved business results can only be fully achieved through a migration to the hybrid cloud, working with mixed infrastructures, private and public clouds, with uniform security for all platforms. For that reason, today we are at a tipping point to make this aspiration a reality as companies realize all the benefits that the hybrid cloud model offers for their businesses.
