When cloud first emerged as a potent technology, the reaction from organizations was mixed. Some of them jumped into the bandwagon right away while others waited until their concerns were answered, especially pertaining to security. Within a few years, AWS and Microsoft emerged as the leaders of the cloud market and their rise also shaped the industry and helped it to mature.
Today, organizations that want to embrace cloud prefer to have a hybrid cloud strategy, where they use the services of multiple vendors and also, have their own data centers. The obvious advantage of this strategy is that they can tap into the benefits of different cloud providers and leverage the power of data centers.
In fact, a research by Gartner shows that by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud strategy because of the flexibility and cost-saving that comes with it.
That said, implementing a hybrid cloud strategy is anything but easy because of the huge complexities that come with it. For example, let’s say you have application A that runs on Azure, application B that runs on AWS and application C that is in your own data center. How will you control access to all these three applications? Will you use a single sign-on for easy user identity management or will you go in for a complex user management system?
The above scenario should give you a glimpse into the challenges that go with a hybrid cloud strategy. Let’s look at a few more now.
On-premise or cloud
One major challenge in hybrid cloud implementation is to decide which services should be managed on-premises and which on the cloud. This complication arises from the growing sophistication and falling prices of computing, or the CPU and RAM that power systems. Vendors like Dell and HP are providing increased capabilities, thereby giving greater value for money.
Such a scenario makes it difficult to determine if you should deploy workloads on your on-premise infrastructure or on an off-premise system that comes with a continuous consolidation of server environments.
Security concerns
Despite all the advancements made in cloud security, concerns still abound. There is a lot of skepticism about whether critical data will be safe in the cloud. Such fears lead to prohibitive costs, in many cases, especially if you have a large and complex IT infrastructure.
Planning
You could be losing thousands of dollars every month and ineffective IT systems, if you don’t plan well. You need to stay on top of the developments both in the cloud industry as well as hardware advancements in the data center industry to help you maximize the benefits of both.
Overall, a hybrid cloud strategy is being preferred over other forms of cloud implementations and rightly so because it offers many benefits. At the same time, there are also challenges that come with it. So, make sure you address and plan these challenges to truly leverage the power of hybrid systems.
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