For about the past decade, there’s been a rising trend among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to adopt a strategic hybrid cloud approach for their IT environment.
Such a strategy is increasingly being embraced as an effective way for companies to optimize costs, boost efficiency, enhance flexibility, expand data storage capacity, and strengthen network security.
According to a newly released report by Allied Market Research, the hybrid cloud market stood at $96.7 billion in 2023, and is projected to top $480 billion by 2033, reflecting a 17.4% compound annual growth rate from 2024 to 2033.
In this article, we’ll outline some of the factors driving more businesses to switch to a hybrid cloud infrastructure model. We’ll also look at some of the disadvantages of hybrid cloud.
After reading this article, you’ll have the information you need to decide if a hybrid cloud approach is the right solution for your business.
Why Are Businesses Choosing Hybrid Cloud?
Increasingly, companies are adopting hybrid cloud solutions as a cost-saving way to eliminate or significantly reduce the significant expense of maintaining an on-premises IT infrastructure.
Related Article: Is Hybrid Cloud The Right IT Solution for Your Business?
With a hybrid cloud environment, some of the data, applications, and networking functions can be moved to the cloud, while others can remain on prem.
For instance, a company using hybrid cloud could keep sensitive personal or proprietary business information in-house through their private cloud while moving other important data to the public cloud.
6 Key reasons for the growing trend in hybrid cloud migration:
1. Cost savings
- By moving some IT functions to the cloud, it means there’s less physical equipment on-prem that businesses have to worry about housing, maintaining, and replacing.
Related Article: On-Prem To Cloud Migration Strategies: 6 Steps For A Smooth Process
- Many cloud service providers offer a popular pay-as-you-go pricing model option, allowing businesses to only have to pay for the services and features they use.
- Can result in indirect savings by shifting some IT functions to the cloud. Businesses can optimize resources by freeing up internal IT staff to take on other responsibilities rather than on prem equipment upkeep.
2. Versatility and customization
- Offers a wide array of enhanced services and features that you can choose from and design your network in a way that’s best suited for your business
- Allows greater flexibility for businesses to scale up or down as their business and resource needs change, eliminating unnecessary spending.
- Improves agility to quickly meet changing customer demands or market shifts.
3. Mobile workforces
- Having remote and hybrid workforces, along with other factors such as the growing use of mobile devices such as tablets, laptops, and smartphones for work, further explain the skyrocketing adoption of hybrid cloud.
Related Article: Top 3 Ways To Secure Your IT Network With A Remote Workforce
- Members of your organization can easily communicate with team members and external clients, vendors, and other stakeholders, as well as access the data, files, and apps they need to perform their jobs by simply having an internet connection.
4. Improved performance
- Boosts the performance, productivity, and security of your IT infrastructure by running critical workloads where they make the most sense
- Allows for automated workload management, where computing workloads are automatically sent to either your on-prem data centers or to the cloud, depending on demand.
5. Robust cybersecurity measures
- Offers built-in, advanced security controls provided by cloud-native applications to protect their data and IT systems.
- Reduces the security risks that come with on-prem device management and maintenance
6. Full cloud migration issues
- Increasingly, a growing number of companies that initially moved their entire IT infrastructure from an on-prem data center to a fully cloud IT infrastructure are now transitioning to hybrid cloud.
- The decision on whether to go with full cloud or hybrid cloud is based an organization’s migration strategy.
- Some are choosing a hybrid cloud approach over fully cloud hosted services because of the complexity of full cloud integration and potential compatibility issues.
Is Hybrid Cloud Right for Your Business?
Although we’ve outlined six of the main reasons more and more organizations are adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures for their businesses, it’s not the right solution for every business.
Related Article: 5 Steps To A Smooth Hybrid Cloud Migration With Minimal Downtime
Some drawbacks to a hybrid cloud architecture include:
- migration costs/budget constraints
- the need for reliable endpoint internet service
- dependence on your cloud provider for services
- cloud provider support availability when app issues arise
- security concerns
- compatibility issues with existing hardware and software
- limited customization options
Deciding if hybrid cloud is the right solution for your business takes careful planning, along with a thorough understanding of your IT needs and long-term business goals.
The Bottom Line With Migrating To Hybrid Cloud
Increasingly, businesses are taking advantage of the improved performance, efficiency, flexibility, and security resulting from migrating to a hybrid cloud computing environment.
After reading this article, you’ve learned that by merging local infrastructure with cloud-based services, hybrid cloud solutions provide businesses the advantage of controlling their own data on-premises while also benefiting from the flexibility and scalability of the cloud.
So, is hybrid cloud the right choice for your business?
When deciding between local data hosting, private cloud, and hybrid cloud IT environments, businesses need to consider a host of factors, including their own in-house technical expertise, regulatory compliance requirements, and budget considerations.
If you need greater flexibility, cost savings, cybersecurity, and operational efficiency, then hybrid cloud could make sense for your business.
At Kelser, we have decades of experience offering customized, strategic IT guidance and budgeting to businesses like yours so that you can make the right technology decisions to drive your business.
If you have questions or want to explore the best cloud strategy for your business, let’s talk. Reach out, and one of our IT experts will respond promptly to get a better understanding of your IT needs and see how we can work together to solve them.
