On-premises or the cloud? For most organizations, the answer is a combination of both.
Organizations continue to capitalize on the benefits of the public cloud: minimal capital investments, seamless scalability and simplified management. However, they’re also recognizing its drawbacks. They’ve seen public cloud costs blow past their budget. They’ve experienced the latency that comes with shuttling data to and from the public cloud. They’re concerned about security, privacy and regulatory mandates.
Because of these issues, some workloads need to stay on premises, either in a private cloud or traditional IT infrastructure. Hybrid IT gives organizations the benefits of the public cloud along with the security and control of an on-premises environment.
What Is Hybrid IT?
Hybrid IT is a combination of on-premises and cloud-based IT resources, with software tools and management platforms that enable these resources to work together. It allows organizations to leverage both approaches, placing workloads and data on the best platform to support specific business outcomes.
The term “hybrid IT” is often used interchangeably with “hybrid cloud,” but they are distinct models. While hybrid IT combines on-premises IT infrastructure with cloud computing, hybrid cloud refers to a combination of public and private cloud services. Hybrid IT encompasses a wider range of IT systems, including legacy hardware, and could incorporate a hybrid cloud component.
Some organizations use hybrid IT as an interim solution while transitioning to the cloud, but for most it’s a logical, long-term solution. Some applications and data must remain on-premises to meet security, compliance, performance or cost objectives. Hybrid IT streamlines management and makes it easier to move data between the two environments.
What Are the Benefits of Hybrid IT?
Hybrid IT enables organizations to rein in cloud costs by keeping certain workloads on-premises. Although the on-premises infrastructure requires capital investments in compute, storage and networking, it provides a predictable cost structure for workloads with consistent resource demands. Large datasets that require intensive processing may be cheaper to maintain on-premises due to the cost of transferring data to and from the cloud.
Security, privacy and regulatory compliance are key benefits of hybrid IT. Organizations can maintain sensitive data on-premises while using cost-efficient cloud storage for less stringent requirements. Hybrid IT also optimizes the user experience by providing faster access to data along with the agility and rapid deployment of cloud services.
Hybrid helps improve the resilience of the IT environment by simplifying data backup and enabling redundancy across multiple geographic areas. IT teams can restore systems and data quickly with little to no downtime. Additionally, hybrid enables the continued support of legacy applications that cannot be migrated to the cloud.
How to Develop a Hybrid IT Strategy
When developing a hybrid IT strategy, a logical first step is to identify any outdated hardware that is ripe for upgrade. Organizations should then analyze the workloads running on that hardware and determine if they should remain on-premises or migrate to the cloud. Organizations can better prioritize their IT investments.
As a next step, organizations should look for any gaps in their IT environment that negatively impact workflows. Data silos should be broken down so that information flows freely and securely among users and applications.
To optimize the value of hybrid IT, organizations should consider where each workload should run and why. Are performance and low latency critical? Are there security and compliance concerns? Does the workload have consistent requirements or are there frequent spikes in resource demands? These are just some of the questions IT teams should ask.
How Verteks Can Help
The Verteks team has extensive experience helping customers develop a hybrid IT strategy. We can use our monitoring and analytics tools to determine application usage and data flows and offer guidance on which applications to maintain onsite and which to move to the cloud. We can also help you evaluate various hybrid IT platforms that enable effective management of both on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based services. Let us help you leverage the best of both on-premises and the cloud with a hybrid IT solution.
