As they grapple with the urgent imperative of digital transformation, South African CIOs know that cloud computing and cutting-edge everything-as-a-service offerings have a key role to play in the future of their enterprises. But few of them have the appetite to make an overnight move from on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud. That’s especially the case for those that have yet to reap the cost savings and ROI they anticipated from their early cloud deployments.

It's thus not surprising that knowledgeable CIOs are looking to hybrid cloud strategies to optimise performance, accelerate time to market, innovate and reduce costs. In a hybrid cloud environment, the computing infrastructure will be composed of a mixture of private and public cloud services. These resources will ideally be orchestrated to work together as seamlessly as possible. Companies can thus use the mix of public and private cloud services that best meet their needs, potentially giving them the best of both worlds.

Research from IDC reveals that around 84% of surveyed South African C-Suite executives are either pursuing or planning hybrid cloud strategies. More than half expect flexibility and significant cost savings from a hybrid cloud strategy, while six in ten view it as useful for conducting testing and development before moving their business-critical workloads to a production environment. Two-thirds, meanwhile are adopting hybrid cloud to simplify application deployment, as many believe the technology will improve their resource allocation, and four in ten want to leverage the operational benefits.

The appeal of a hybrid cloud is that it enables an organisation to reduce risk and accelerate value in digital transformations. It’s a smarter approach that allows companies to benefit from the scale and flexibility of the public cloud where it makes sense while maintaining more control via a private cloud in instances when data gravity, latency, security, performance, or app entanglement are concerns. IBM claims that the value derived from a full hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud vendor approach.

Let’s simplify some of the benefits of a hybrid cloud approach:

• Flexibility: A company can create, shift and scale workloads and resources on both the public and private clouds, using each where it’s most appropriate and cost-effective.
• Scalability: The enterprise is assured more control over some data and applications in its private cloud, yet easily taps into more storage and computing power from the public cloud when necessary.
• Security: A hybrid cloud gives a company more options for securing data at rest and in transit.
• Control: Instead of putting all aspects of IT infrastructure in the hands of a third-party provider, a company can keep control over sensitive resources and data.
• Data egress: Data egress fees—the cost of moving data out of the public cloud—are one of the cloud’s biggest hidden costs. Storing crucial data in the private section of a hybrid cloud environment may be a way to avoid or reduce them.
• Get to the cloud faster: Reducing or eliminating data, security, or latency constraints via the use of a private cloud opens the door for companies to modernise more of their applications and migrate from legacy platforms to modern infrastructure.

• Use cases: The use cases for the hybrid cloud are numerous. CIOs can use a scalable public cloud for dynamic workloads while leaving less volatile workloads to a private cloud. They can also move to the public cloud at their own pace, expanding from a small-scale private cloud as it makes sense to do so. And the hybrid cloud gives companies options in navigating data sovereignty and privacy concerns when it comes to certain workloads.

  At 1Nebula, our knowledgeable experts have helped many organisations to accelerate digital transformation and simplify their journey to the cloud. Get in touch to learn how our cutting-edge identity & access management, cloud expense management, and cloud integration solutions can support your migration to the hybrid cloud.