Why a hybrid cloud infrastructure is a must for your business

A hybrid cloud infrastructure can boost your business efficiency, foster innovation and power revenue growth – all while reducing IT costs and downtime.

Connectivity is everything in the modern business environment. But you need the IT infrastructure to make it happen. From integrated company-wide workflows to AI-assisted data analysis, your business processes must be built on an IT infrastructure that can optimize efficiency, scale up and down at will, and protect your vital data – all while controlling costs.

These are the business needs that are leading more and more organizations to adopt a hybrid cloud infrastructure. By combining on-premises and hosted cloud services, businesses can be confident that the right data and workflows are happening in the right environments.

It’s all about gaining the power to quickly adopt and leverage new technologies as they appear, respond to emerging market needs before your competitors, and support integrated workflows that deliver real-world efficiency – while safeguarding valuable customer data, proprietary information, and sensitive business processes.

Powering revenue growth

Achieving sustainable revenue growth is the number-one goal for most businesses. While it’s certainly true that a hybrid cloud environment will help you save on IT costs, that’s really only the beginning of the story.

A hybrid cloud infrastructure can drive revenue growth by increasing your speed to market, helping you leverage data to find innovative new ways to serve your customers, boosting your bottom-line cost efficiency, and ensuring seamless app integration across your workflows. Here’s how:

Speed to market

Any business is only as good as its people. In the digital economy, it’s also true that any business is only as good as its software. Whether you’re developing new products or rolling out new services to your market, a hybrid cloud environment enables you to leverage the latest software tools without the need to put a heavy CapEx investment into upgrading your on-site servers.

Data-driven innovation

Data is the secret language of innovation. With the right analysis, it has the power to reveal what your customers want and how they want it delivered. However, you need to balance the need to give your people fast access to the data they need with your obligation to protect it. The hybrid cloud delivers on both fronts. Use the cloud to enable fast company-wide access to the data they need, while retaining data that’s not in active use on your protected on-site servers.

Bottom-line cost efficiency

While a hybrid cloud infrastructure will help you save on upfront IT costs, it’s an improvement in cost efficiency that really pays off. That is, improvements to process efficiency via scalable hybrid cloud services will empower your people to do more with less. And that’s powerful medicine for your bottom line.

Seamless app integration

Your workflows no doubt call on multiple systems and apps, and the seamless integration between them is vital for maximizing the high-level efficiency you need to generate more revenue. The hybrid cloud enables you to work with all your on-premises legacy software while adding new cloud-based apps as needs dictate.

Designing a successful hybrid cloud strategy

Of course, to achieve any of the above benefits you’ll need to design and implement a hybrid cloud strategy that works for your business. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

Seamless IT infrastructure across workloads

You need to identify which workloads will remain on-premises, which will be hosted in the cloud, and which will span both. For example, you may choose to keep mission-critical functions on-premises, while running non-critical tasks in the cloud to reduce the burden on your in-house servers. This blueprint will form the basis of your infrastructure framework and tell your IT team where workloads will need to be integrated across your clouds and on-premises network.

Maximize speed and efficiency

You may have already used virtualization to solve the problem of underutilized processing power. However, a hybrid cloud strategy takes this process a step future by running on multiple cloud stacks across your data center and public clouds to further maximize the speed and efficiency of your network.

Add capacity, not complexity

A hybrid cloud network makes is much easier – and more cost effective – to scale capacity up and down as needed. Your strategy should examine the times of year or likely circumstances that will require extra capacity, and consider setting operational triggers that will initiate a scale-up. The same goes for scaling down. Knowing exactly when you should commence a scale-down will help save costs.

Allocate resources as needed

It’s likely that all of your team doesn’t need access to all of your IT resources all of the time. Include a resources-allocation plan in your hybrid cloud strategy to ensure you don’t over-capitalize. This will help to eliminate unnecessary drain on your IT infrastructure and reduce downtime related to network stress.

Control costs while boosting efficiency

Keeping your on-premises data center hardware up to date can be costly. On the other hand, running outdated legacy infrastructure can lead to spiraling maintenance and downtime expenses, along with loss of efficiency. Many hybrid cloud providers are solving that problem with subscription-based models. For example, HPE Technology Refresh replaces the costs of ownership with predictable monthly or quarterly payments on a faster routine refresh cycle between 24 and 48 months. That essentially means you can reap the efficiency benefits of running the latest hardware without the daunting CapEx investment.

Deploying a hybrid cloud infrastructure delivers the best of both worlds. Retain mission-critical workflows and data on your on-premises services, while sending the rest to the cloud. This will increase the speed and efficiency of your network while improving scalability and reducing IT costs. And that delivers wins on multiple fronts.