Spending on public cloud services has grown rapidly in recent years, with IDC identifying a rise from a $229B run rate in 2019 to almost $500B in 2023. As a result of this investment, it’s predicted that by 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on hybrid cloud to meet their infrastructure needs. But what is hybrid cloud, and why are so many businesses paying increased attention to it?

Hybrid cloud refers to a computing environment or an infrastructure that facilitates the use of data and applications among on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. With a hybrid cloud approach, businesses can move away from legacy infrastructure to attract new customers, expand into new markets, and guarantee data security and accessibility for all users, regardless of their location and device type.

Since the global COVID-19 outbreak, we’ve seen many organizations look for simpler ways to manage increasingly complex infrastructure models and scale up or down to meet changing customer demands. As cloud ecosystems continue to evolve, many users realize the need for custom solutions for their businesses. As a result, the move to hybrid cloud, which was already happening, has been accelerated because of the pandemic.

Top Three Challenges Solved by Hybrid Cloud 

Hybrid cloud solves several challenges for businesses, thereby extending business capabilities across all virtual environments to increase flexibility, availability, and speed. Here are the top three challenges we’re focusing on in this article:

• Lack of agility

A business reliant on data centers can only process and distribute data in batches, and other legacy systems often restrict the ability to add or build new features needed to scale. This causes speed limitations, delays in reporting, limited capacity, and a lack of real-time data. Hybrid cloud enables more dynamic workloads for business intelligence by leveraging high availability and 24/7 operations to stream data in real time. 

• Regional requirements

Regulations and laws in certain geographic areas can make it harder for people to understand how they can leverage the cloud to process data while keeping up with governance and security requirements. 

Following a hybrid cloud approach can quickly connect your existing infrastructure to available cloud infrastructure in other countries while solving compliance challenges with data localization. Furthermore, by offering agile technology to coincide with the shift toward agile operations, hybrid cloud enables a range of solutions for navigating IT stack complexity and overcoming dependencies of legacy applications.

• Developer experience

Growing businesses are recruiting developers every day, but it’s exceptionally challenging to onboard them due to the lack of business-critical developer tools in a virtual environment. Hybrid cloud enables the business to provide workspaces, tools, and secure access to sharing documents, drastically improving the developer experience. 

For longer-tenured and successfully onboarded developers, the flexibility and availability of hybrid cloud can help break down infrastructure and knowledge management silos, speed long dev/release cycles, and decrease time spent on managing stacks and resources. And perhaps best of all, hybrid cloud can reduce effort through the automation of manual processes, giving developers more time to focus on building products and new features. 

How a Hybrid Cloud Partner Can Help

These benefits and more are the reason many businesses are opting for hybrid cloud. However, most companies aren’t prepared to implement due to skills-related and migration challenges. Leveraging a knowledgeable and certified cloud partner cuts out the guesswork and reduces the time it takes to implement the right solutions. 

Wizeline takes a vendor-agnostic approach to cloud solutions and provides custom cloud strategies for each of our client’s business and technology needs. We partner with the three industry-leading cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — to ensure we have the necessary resources and expertise to make every engagement successful. 

To learn more about how Wizeline can help you implement or optimize your hybrid and multi-cloud strategy, please visit our landing page or contact our team at consulting@wizeline.com.