Embrace Hybrid Cloud Architecture to Get the Competitive Edge

Explore how a hybrid cloud architecture helps organizations tap into resources that accelerate and elevate competitive advantages.

Your organization has made investments in digital transformation to drive performance and get business results. Yet, 70% of all initiatives will fall short of their goals.¹

A hybrid cloud architecture, which consists of a private and public cloud data center, can help your organization meet and exceed digital transformation goals by giving you data center agility.

This agility comes from access to hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) for your dynamic workloads, while allowing you to keep sensitive workloads in your private data centers.

In return, this agility opens up a world of opportunity to innovate and accelerate. For example, hybrid cloud architecture allows organizations to tap into resources like software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings that would otherwise be impossible or cost prohibitive for your organization to build.

Without the agility that hybrid services, computing, and storage environments provide, the IT organization will be unable to supply its business units with value-adding technology services.

Your organization would be missing an opportunity to keep up with the competition or perhaps get ahead. Some companies even see this lead to business units creating entire technology teams working to solve problems that the larger IT organization couldn’t address.

Implementing a Hybrid Cloud Architecture

The key to creating a hybrid cloud architecture is integrating the technology silos that already exist at the infrastructure layers.

Traditionally, data centers are built on three tier architectures—network, storage, and compute—and managed by three disparate teams—network, storage, and server or virtualization.

Companies must move to a platform operations model to integrate these team’s processes to support orchestration and automation across applications and IT service management. The IT organization will inevitably have to support traditional services, but also those in the form of SaaS- and PaaS-based consumption models.

It’s important to note that even when companies have started adopting the new model, unless they embrace true software-defined data center (SDDC) mindsets, they won’t break free of the limitations of traditional data centers.

Benefits of Modernizing to Hybrid

From 2017 to 2020, Gartner client requests to discuss hybrid cloud have grown 15% for this reason: Hybrid cloud architectures allow organizations to see quicker time to value for initiates that require technology services, which is basically everything these days.²

A few benefits of the hybrid cloud include processing “big data” datasets, adding elasticity, and planning for the future.

Leverage Data Analytics
Using scalability within public cloud can power big data analytic projects; this could have significant business implications. Meanwhile, your private data center can ensure data security.

On-Demand Elasticity
Some projects require greater resources than your private cloud can provide. Having a hyperscaler to lean on is more cost effective and efficient than overinvesting in owned infrastructure that is only temporarily needed.

Flexibility for the Future
2020 taught the business world that survival could mean transforming operations in a matter of days. A hybrid cloud approach allows businesses to adapt to needs as they arise.

With a hybrid approach, there’s no need for businesses and IT organizations to become experts in technology for one-off projects or find themselves playing catch up to cloud services they can’t compete with. The time and resources required to implement and become experts in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or natural language processing is simply not cost effective. Why create your own service when you could simply consume one when needed?

How to Get Started

Barring very particular needs that require a strictly public cloud or an on-premises approach, a hybrid cloud infrastructure will give you access to opportunities. EchoStor is here to help you make the most of these opportunities.

We offer consulting services to kickstart your journey as you break down silos and start changing your internal structure.

We help companies implement software and hardware for SDDC implementations.

And, we have tested solutions and architectures that we know work and are agile enough to scale with your business and their need for cloud services moving forward.

We’d love to learn more about your digital transformation goals and how we can help.

Explore how we can help you get a competitive edge through a hybrid cloud environment.

¹ Forth P, Reichert T, de Laubier R, Chakraborty S, “Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success,” BCG Global, October 2020.
² Costello K, “The CIO’s Guide to Distributed Cloud,” Smarter With Gartner, August 2020.