20 June 2016

Cloud directions: Hybrid cloud is here to stay

In the hybrid cloud, you gain the best value from your cloud and on-premise resources

As companies become more sophisticated in understanding the differences between cloud services, they also gain a better sense of when a workload or application is best placed in the cloud or on-premise. There will probably be very few operations that deploy all of their data and applications either in the cloud or locally. Most everybody else will want to keep all options open. As an article in the Wall Street Journal mentioned in October 2015, the hybrid cloud is set to maintain an annual growth rate of 27 percent between then and 2019, accelerating past the overall IT market.

Software tools like the fast-growing, collaboration and content management system Egnyte are built for the hybrid cloud and offer the flexibility, visibility, and control to help IT managers align and adjust with changing business requirements. Platforms such as the Microsoft Azure Stack aim to simplify hybrid deployments and shorten the time-to-benefit for hybrid solutions.

Better user experiences and enhanced management flexibility

As hybrid cloud scenarios become more pervasive, they will deliver consistent. connected user experiences. Most users will be neither concerned nor aware of the actual location of their files and systems.

Systems managers, on the other hand, will have more freedom to plan workloads in the hybrid cloud to achieve the levels of productivity, availability, security, and performance they need to deliver to the business. It will also become much easier for them to test applications and architectures in the cloud, or move resources from the cloud to local systems and back, depending on what is most effective at the time.