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Understanding Hybrid Cloud Benefits and Management For Organizations

Posted by Errin O'Connor on Oct, 30, 2020 09:10

The adoption of the Cloud has skyrocketed in the past decade. We witness widespread adoption among all sectors because of hybrid cloud benefits, and the cloud industry alone is expected to reach $623.3 Billion by 2023!

While the use of technology and Saas in general increases, organizations tend to store more and more of their data on the Cloud. There are many cloud services to choose from, and it is a cumbersome task to choose the right one depending on your needs.

Factors like security, efficiency, speed, and others play a significant role in selecting the right cloud services. This is where the hybrid cloud comes into the picture!

In this post, we discover the benefits of the Hybrid Cloud and its role in management.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Most of the companies are using either the public or the private Cloud. There are risks involved in choosing either of the two and depending on the particular source for all the data in your company.

Hybrid Cloud is a system that combines multiple cloud environments to protect your data and increase systems’ efficiency. Typically, the combinations of cloud environments used in Hybrid Cloud are Public and Private.

The management is done with software that helps automate and manage everything across on-premise and public cloud environments.

Things to consider before implementing Hybrid Cloud for your Business

There are many things to consider and understand before you implement a Hybrid Cloud in your Business.

The primary considerations are – 

Security

There are different levels of security that you get from on-premise and public cloud options. Companies have requirements like encryption but often tend to overlook the limitation of performance caused by encryption.

However, for taking Hybrid cloud benefits, Your cloud storage system should have monitoring and management systems that take care of all the necessities simultaneously.

Division of workload

You have to consider the requirements and types of data that are utilized by your company. 

Factors like users, integration, networking, workloads have to be considered while choosing a management system, so you are well equipped for all scenarios. 

The management system must leverage all the options and features of public and private clouds to increase efficiency.

Centralized management

If you are dealing with multiple clouds, you have to operate the theme separately and keep track of them. This will get messy when you have 10s of cloud environments and multiple departments managing their files of different cloud environments.

The Hybrid cloud management tools in these cases help by giving you a centralized system where you can manage all clouds in the same window. Among different Hybrid cloud benefits, you can also view and process files in one window and keep track of all the developments!

Performance

Performance is one of the most important factors while choosing a cloud system. All the files and departments in your company will not have the same level of requirements.

The level of importance of using that data and the frequency will also differ from department to department.

Hybrid cloud management systems help you divide the files into the right sections, so you are ready for peak performance. It makes sure that specific files that are not going to be used often do not use the best cloud options, which usually cost more!

Hybrid cloud benefits

Hybrid cloud benefits and management

There are hundreds of benefits of hybrid Cloud because of which it is being adopted by the majority of the large corporations. It is one tool that can help take the tension of managing your data and files off your shoulder.

These are the main benefits of the Hybrid Cloud.

Centralized management system

A Hybrid Cloud management system helps you manage and oversee everything from one place.

While having data on multiple cloud systems is the need of the hour, ensuring everything is optimized is also essential. Hybrid Cloud allows you to have control over everything from one window.

Some of the things that you would need on a daily basis are – 

  • Provisioning
  • Authorizations
  • Transferring files within different cloud platforms
  • Cost data
  • Managing and creating alerts
  • Addressing failures that might occur
  • View activities that are taking place
  • Oversee tasks done by employees

An excellent hybrid Cloud Management system like Microsoft’s Hybrid Cloud allows us to do all this along with hundreds of other features. Microsoft’s software has gone through numerous iterations, which makes it the best among all the options. Microsoft has taken care of all the requirements that a business can have while managing cloud systems.

Managing costs and increasing ROI

One of the biggest problems faced by companies managing different cloud systems separately is comparing and choosing the best options. Cloud service providers do not display the actual costs of all the services clearly, resulting in many inefficiencies in finance plans.

With Microsoft Hybrid cloud, you can create spending limits for users and even specific groups in your company. Along with this, all the users can access the current and past usage of resources on cloud systems.

You can easily allot specific cloud platforms to a group and even create limits for particular users, so they get alerts when a specific number is breached. Some of the factors which are monitored continuously are – 

  • Uptime
  • CPU Memory stats
  • Power Off time
  • Parked time

With this level of monitoring, you are always on top of usage. This will help you to optimize the usage and reduce costs significantly. This will result in a significant increase in ROI!

Managing approvals with automation

Approvals take up a lot of time for management professionals. With the power of Microsoft Hybrid cloud, you can automate all the processes along with some rules.

You can easily set some approval rules by defining some limits, so you won’t have to give permissions every time manually.

Optimization

This is the most significant benefit of Microsoft Hybrid cloud because of which it is adopted by most of the companies. The algorithm behind the software, which is powered by AI, helps identify areas for optimization.

Some of the examples are – 

  • Sizing of servers
  • Identifying the candidates for auto parking
  • Autoscaling based on set rules
  • Identifying resources which are underutilized and parking them
  • Identifying platforms which are underutilized but still contribute to the overall budget
  • Recognizing areas to decrease cost based on usage patterns

Templates and Customization

When you use one cloud platform, you tend to get accustomed to the UX and other dashboard systems. With Microsoft Hybrid Cloud, you can create the same dashboard for all the cloud platforms you deal with.

Many templates can be integrated for different systems, and the software imports the data to give you a uniform user interface. You can also customize the fields and all the sections to your needs, so you are well equipped for high efficiencies.

Management of SLAs

Service level agreements are signed between cloud platforms and your company to ensure you receive the level of performance from Cloud that you pay for. 

While managing multiple public and private clouds, it becomes cumbersome to keep track of all and make changes if the terms in these agreements are breached.

The Microsoft Hybrid Cloud helps you manage and control all the SLAs in one dashboard and also oversee all of them at any point.

Deployment automation

The Hybrid Cloud system supports DevOps and CI/CD workflows.

This is a crucial factor for the efficiency and speed of the tasks of your software.

Using this feature, the developers can automate the deployment of dev, test, and the production environments.

Integration and APIs

Another benefit is the ease of integration. The integration of the APIs is also a snap with the Hybrid Cloud.

It is common for API integration to be difficult with your custom software, ERP or CRM. This problem is totally resolved when you just have to integrate the Cloud with the Hybrid Cloud, which is done at the click of a button.

Platform as a service

The Hybrid Cloud is also referred to as “Platform as a service” or PAAS because of the numerous capabilities it offers.

You can divide the same resources within your team and change settings at any time, which is precisely what you get on any platform. This is why the system is referred to as a platform.

Conclusion

Hybrid Cloud is the future of how businesses will manage their data and files. Having all your cloud systems, including the on-premise ones, integrated with the Hybrid Cloud will help you to have the edge over your competition.

It will decrease costs to a large extent and reduce the management of tasks and permissions tremendously. Start small by defining your goal and adopt the technology, which will increase efficiency, decrease costs, and give you time to focus on growth!

If you are looking for a Hybrid Cloud consultant who can help you integrate and customize all your cloud platforms together, Contact Us to get custom quotes for your Business!

We are a certified Microsoft partner and have integrated the Microsoft Hybrid Cloud for numerous large corporations along with optimizing it to be in line with the ROI goals!!!

About the Author

Errin O'Connor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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