By Peter Reid (Head of Cloud) & Michael Huynh (Head of Hybrid Cloud)

Hybrid cloud solutions have emerged to address the many concerns associated with public cloud migration. In this blog, we will explore how hybrid cloud can help resolve enterprises' most common and frequently aired public cloud migration issues, such as security, compliance, cost, and lack of operation expertise.

Recently, I had the privilege of presenting at the ADAPT Connected Cloud and DC Edge event in Sydney for Telstra Purple. We used the opportunity to discuss why hybrid cloud has become “the new normal” when it comes to addressing various business challenges and accelerates digital transformation.

Why hybrid cloud means you can have it all

Hybrid Cloud provides the flexibility to host applications and data where it makes the most sense, considering security, performance, and data locality. Organisations can leverage powerful services from public cloud as well as have the control and locality that private cloud provides to meet their business requirements.

Thanks to the automation of cloud deployment processes in a hybrid environment, enterprises can migrate to the cloud much more quickly. This ease and speed of deployment have led to 46% faster migrations and a spike in native cloud service adoption, which is 2.5 times greater or customers leveraging hybrid cloud in their migration to public cloud.

Given the current climate and the increasing prevalence of would-be hackers, security is of paramount importance to enterprises embarking on this path.

Hybrid cloud solutions can help enterprises improve data security by enabling them to implement a security and governance layer across the data in their clouds regardless of where they are, on-premises or in public cloud. This provides a consistent layer of security so the enterprise can control access to the on-premises data and the cloud data through a single interface.

In the event of a cyberattack, such as a ransomware attack, Hybrid Cloud allows us to provide customers with a robust and clean environment that is “air-gapped” from their original environment. This can be fully deployed in a matter of hours rather than months, which significantly reduces the losses incurred through downtime during that recovery process.

Proactive and reactive measures need to be in place in today’s production environment, and a multi-layered approach to ransomware and other attacks is critical, which is what hybrid cloud enables and delivers.

Good for the environment

Sustainability is another high priority for many organisations. According to a recent report by Telstra Purple partner Microsoft, workload in the cloud is at least 90 per cent more carbon efficient than one on-premises.

This is because hyperscalers are using highly efficient datacentres and infrastructure and locating DCs where they can use renewables to make them carbon neutral or negative. For example, using a datacentre next to a hydroelectric generator is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint.

As cloud service providers have economies of scale, this means they can invest in more energy-efficient infrastructure and technologies than most enterprises can afford. The cloud providers optimise their infrastructure and data centres to minimise energy consumption whilst maximising performance.

Scalability and Flexibility

Speaking of scale, hybrid cloud solutions allow enterprises to scale their IT infrastructure up or down as needed. They can use the public cloud for peak demand periods and then scale back to the private cloud when demand decreases. This helps enterprises to optimise their infrastructure usage and save costs.

In summary, given that they provide a solution to the most pressing concerns expressed by enterprises around cloud migration, including data security, scalability, cost-efficiency, flexibility, and disaster recovery, it is clear why the hybrid cloud will be instrumental in removing barriers to enterprise cloud adoption.