When technology is used poorly, it gets in the way of accomplishing business goals. Used correctly, technology instead offers leverage that helps achieve those goals. Hybrid cloud, by allowing companies the ability to use public or private clouds, whichever is most appropriate, provides flexibility allowing companies to derive the maximum benefit from cloud technology. Here are three ways hybrid cloud can enable business success:

1. Scale to Handle Peak Loads

Building out capacity to handle maximum load is important if a company doesn’t want to lose customers, but the expense can result in a lot of equipment that’s frequently underutilized if the heavy load occurs only for a limited period of time, like the holiday shopping season. With hybrid cloud, a company can own, maintain, and support only the capacity needed for ordinary volumes and integrate processing capability in the cloud to handle those transient periods of heavy load.

2. Expand to Take on New Business

Creating reliable software requires providing developers and testers with environments that are as capable as the production environment will be, but the development and test environments are only needed for a limited period of time. Hybrid cloud allows these environments to be built and used as needed, and ensures that each dev/test environment provides the capabilities needed for that application.

In addition, the cloud supports innovation. Developers can quickly build a proof of concept without a large investment in hardware, and the cloud can be used to test the new business opportunity on a small scale before investing in a production-level environment. The costs and delays of requisitions and provisioning are eliminated, letting you get to market faster.

3. Support Disaster Recovery

Maintaining a second data center in standby mode is costly and complex. Using disaster recovery to the cloud simplifies the process and makes an alternative processing site affordable for any size business. In this model, data and server images are uploaded to the cloud, where they can be easily brought to an active state if a disaster makes the primary data center unavailable.

Of course, there are challenges that need to be overcome in order to get these benefits of hybrid cloud. Like we said at the start, the benefits of technology come from leveraging the technology in support of business goals.

Challenges in Creating a Hybrid Cloud

Implementing the private cloud requires making architectural decisions and investing in hardware, though the design can be simplified through the use of products like Nutanix. Utilizing the public cloud requires addressing concerns such as information security and requires effective data governance policies monitored and enforced using tools such as Veritas. And there need to be reasoned-through decisions regarding where each dataset and application should reside.

Managed services help ensure that your technical environment is built and functions to support the business. dcVast can create and support your hybrid cloud environment to help you derive the benefits of the technology. Contact us to receive a free IT health check and learn more about managed services options with Nutanix, Veritas, and Oracle Cloud or Amazon Web Services.