Cloud adoption rates continue to rise accelerated by the paradigm shift in 2020 that changed the way we work and live. As a result, more organizations require interoperable hosted environments to realize their technology transformation ambitions.
Real and perceived concerns regarding data security, ownership, governance, data sovereignty and regulatory compliance have constrained cloud migration to the public cloud for many organizations.
Furthermore, public clouds typically offer less customization to optimize solutions and meet unique business requirements.
Cloud adoption steams ahead
But businesses of all sizes continue to embrace new cloud-based digital applications, collaboration tools, and IP-based communication capabilities. These are used to drive innovation, create new business models, reduce costs, and craft new digital customer experiences.
The need to create seamless interoperability between existing on-premise systems has grown in unison with growth in this public cloud ecosystem.
This resultant need for interoperability between multiple public and private cloud environments has driven demand for hybrid cloud solutions.
Harnessing the hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud environments allow users to configure their cloud capabilities by selecting elements from multiple service providers to meet their unique needs and preferences.
In this regard, interoperable solutions that enable hybrid or multi-cloud delivery models offer organizations numerous benefits.
Importantly, hybrid solutions give organizations greater control over their technology strategy. The model provides a secure means to leverage the cloud to manage risks. Businesses can maintain physical control and access to on-premise servers that host critical, sensitive or regulated data and information.
Proximity to on-site equipment ensures single-digit millisecond latency to execute mission-critical computational tasks or deliver a better end-user experience.
Businesses can also ‘sweat’ the sunk investments made into infrastructure and on-premise cloud capabilities without sacrificing their ability to scale or innovate. For instance, on-premise infrastructure often allows organizations to “lift and shift” their existing systems into the cloud without the need to adapt or reconfigure them to run on pre-installed cloud software or services.
Open architecture the true enabler
And as organizations advance their cloud transformation journeys, the ability to adopt multiple solutions from various providers will become critical.
Vendor lock-in and the ‘walled gardens’ created by the major public cloud providers can constrain growth and throttle innovation, thereby diluting the cloud value proposition.
Thus, multi-cloud will become the new norm, as organizations will experience the freedom to operate their workload with private, public, or hybrid cloud providers.
And creating the optimal mix between public and on-premise environments will remain highly specific to organizations. Implementing the appropriate solution requires strategic decision-making and solutions that offer flexibility.
Open hybrid cloud architectures offer the ideal solution. This model enables a business to blend public clouds with existing on-premise computing resources across vendors and technology stacks.
This flexibility helps to craft unique operational models that can unlock capabilities such as dynamic scaling and rules-based automation.
An open cloud architecture also lays the foundation for a hybrid model that spans physical servers, multiple virtualized machines and platforms, and various applications and technology stacks to realize true heterogeneous cloud-based computing capabilities.
Future-proofed cloud transformation
Furthermore, hybrid cloud capabilities can help to future-proof a business by unlocking ways to incrementally embrace new technologies. This includes the scalability and flexibility to respond quickly to changing requirements or market dynamics.
Ultimately, embracing an open hybrid architecture enables application, data and solution portability across clouds. It can also extract the full value from existing IT investments and infrastructure, without creating new silos.
In this regard, open cloud architectures provide significant strategic business value and deliver true cloud computing capabilities.
Read the second part about True Hybrid Cloud Computing Capabilities by Pavel Skilionak.