Tata Communications : How to scale your business quicker with hybrid cloud ...

The challenge of scaling your business is always a great one and seldom leaves any of your company's departments untouched. From HR and accounting to marketing, sales, and all IT divisions all need to come to the party. While this is not outwardly apparent, this defines the extent of success, impacting your company's overall future market position and financial health.

The cloud-first world

According to the latest RightScale report, 95% of businesses are already using or experimenting with cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And, by 2021, Gartner reports that out of all organisations using the cloud today, more than a half will not just have a few workloads in the cloud, they will be 'all in.' This means that rather than lifting and shifting into the cloud, companies will be refactoring and re-building directly in the cloud. In other words, there's no going back to on-prem.

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Agility through hybrid cloud

Enterprises expect business agility, on-demand scalability, innovation, reduced total cost of owership with improved security. While public cloud seemingly addresses these requirements, the lack of in-house cloud experts, managing multiple vendors, expensive platforms, and the complexity and constant evolution of public clouds are some of the challenges that prevent the CIO from harnessing the true power of the cloud.

Hybrid cloud provides the scalability most businesses seek by integrating public cloud resources with an organisation's existing infrastructure, so they can provide new capabilities to their end users while reducing costs even more. Essentially, hybrid cloud solutions give organisations unlimited resources on-demand while maximising their existing infrastructure investments. Businesses like the flexibility behind the model, and it's for this reason that hybrid cloud adoptions continue to rise.

Adopting a hybrid cloud model doesn't necessarily free you from the challenges of public cloud. It all depends on how your solution is architected and managed. If you manage your hybrid cloud yourself, you'll likely find the same challenges with talent acquisition, or managing the infrastructure and applications (perhaps more so), as with a pure public cloud approach. Even cost management may not fully be solved if you don't know where to place your workloads. Therefore, it's critical to work with your cloud service provider to architect a proper solution that addresses the scalability and growth of your business needs while taking advantage of your current infrastructure.

The CIO's best friend

Among the many successful use cases for the cloud, enterprises are increasingly using the cloud as their disaster recovery location or leveraging the power of cloud for SAP by reliably running the critical yet suitable instances of SAP workloads on cloud. Amidst such complex cloud deployments, the right cloud management partner could end up becoming the CIO's best friend. If you tap into the partner's expertise in cloud architecture and management, you and your IT team can instead focus on working closely with your businesses on other projects to drive revenue growth. A managed cloud services provider is also able to handle your hybrid platform for you if you wish, or work together with you to make sure you're getting maximum mileage from your systems.

It's easy for a new cloud project to get derailed because of spiralling costs. Perhaps most importantly, a managed hybrid cloud provider can also help you keep track of your billing, so you can manage costs - which is the #1 challenge of mature cloud users, according to RightScale. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone on your team who understands how it works, and make sure you're scaling efficiently? A managed provider will monitor your environment and can alert you to any sudden increases in your cloud spend, freeing you from the hassle of trying to figure out which cloud is getting what percentage of your budget.

Harnessing IT for growth

There is a long way between developing a cloud strategy and successfully executing it, and there are often many roadblocks ahead. The risks posed by cyber threats and potential leaks or loss of data are a critical concern, forcing CIOs to re-look at their IT set-up to ensure that critical IP and customer data are protected. Yet, at the same, they are under growing pressure to create efficiencies and harness IT for the growth of the business through digital transformation programmes. This is a balancing act where the scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of hybrid cloud, as well as the right partner, will make a huge difference.

Learn more about how you can scale your business with the power of hybrid cloud.