According to a report by Gartner, in three years, more than 45% of “IT spending on system infrastructure, infrastructure software, application software, and business process outsourcing will shift from traditional solutions to the cloud”. 

When it comes to cloud computing, an enterprise can go one of three ways — public, private, or hybrid. Depending on its specific requirements, an organization may want or need to combine public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises resources to gain the agility it needs for a competitive advantage. 

Choosing a cloud strategy depends on business needs, current cloud strategy, organization size and culture, dependency and compatibility with legacy systems, industry, geographic distribution, and need for collaboration. A cloud managed services provider can guide you in this process. 

Public Cloud

A public cloud, the most common type, is a cloud environment that is publicly offered to many cloud customers without restriction by a third-party service provider that owns, operates, and maintains all the associated software, hardware, storage, and network devices.

In such an environment, the cloud service on offer in a public cloud is often provisioned through a SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS setting.

Although here there is less control over data security as you don’t know where your data is operating and higher operational expenditure, capital expenditure is lower as you don’t need to purchase all your own data center equipment. 

Other advantages are high reliability as services are distributed across multiple data centers and there is no long-term commitment to a vendor or restraint by license capacity, and flexibility to scale up or down almost unlimited due to on-demand cloud resources.

Private Cloud

A private cloud that can either be deployed exclusively within a single organization and maintained and controlled by the cloud service provider or deployed exclusively within a single organization and maintained and controlled by the organization. In both scenarios, the private cloud is utilized privately in a controlled environment by a single organization.

Although, there is higher capital expenditure involved and greater responsibility for operating and maintaining your own data center, IT hardware, and enterprise software; the advantages here are the flexibility to customize the cloud to accommodate business needs with the scalability and efficiency of a public cloud. 

Capital expenditure here may be significant but operational costs will be lower. Also, greater security as data and applications remain accessible only to the organization.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud is a combination of private and public cloud services. Hybrid clouds give organizations the flexibility to customize resource allocation with outside cloud services while retaining control of internal resources. Workloads can be moved between private and public infrastructure as needs and costs change.

Hybrid clouds offer the advantages of both public and private clouds as they are a judicious mix of both. The main value of the hybrid cloud lies in supporting digital business transformation. The additional benefit of a hybrid cloud is agility. It can adapt and change direction quickly is a core principle of a digital business.

It also offers flexibility to customize resource allocation with outside cloud services; provides control and security of internal resources, and enables workloads to move between private and public infrastructure.

Achieve the right mix with a Hybrid Cloud

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to choosing your cloud infra mix – but here are some options:

• Heritage on-premises hosting and colocation
• Leveraging services within the dynamic public cloud
• Developing a transformation program to test if the cloud is a good fit
• Suitable deployment model for compliance, regulatory, risk, latency, or data sovereignty issues

To look at the future of hybrid cloud computing and what it brings to the table, let’s go back a few years. In 2017, Evaluator Group published a report where they surveyed potential and current enterprise hybrid cloud users.

At the time, it was found that 62% of the respondents had deployed hybrid clouds. Around 60% of the respondents had also said they would increase hybrid cloud workloads. When they returned to the respondents in 2021, it was found that 98% of respondents had deployed a hybrid cloud architecture.

The market for public, private, and hybrid cloud is growing. The major public cloud behemoths (AWS, GCP, Azure) are taking steps towards supporting hybrid cloud computing. But the question is whether a hybrid cloud is right for you. Allow us to help you move in the right direction – contact us today.