Unlocking the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Solutions

4 Hybrid Cloud Benefits for Businesses

Regardless of size and niche, businesses are increasingly turning to the cloud for their computing needs. Hybrid Cloud-based services offer limitless scalability, flexibility, and convenience. 

1. Security and Compliance 

Data Control Issues: 

When using cloud technology, accessing sensitive data is often a major concern. With a hybrid cloud solution, businesses have full control over sensitive data. With a hybrid cloud, organizations have the ability to keep the most critical and sensitive information on-site in a private cloud while using a public cloud for less critical data. It allows organizations to decide where data is stored as well as who is able to access it.  

Increased Protection: 

Both the public and private sectors deliver an additional protection to the hybrid cloud environments. Each private cloud gives a unique area to hold the documents that are confidential, and the public cloud gives advanced protection with the ability to encrypt and utilize multi-factor protection. With the combined use, organizations improve their protection as well as the ability to defend themselves. Cyber threats are a real possibility, and organizations have the ability to protect themselves. 

Standard Security 

Along with improved protection, hybrid clouds deliver standardized security protocols across all environments. Meaning, it does not matter where your information is stored, on-premise, or in the public cloud, it will all be safeguarded with the same fundamental security and control. This not only streamlines management, but also ensures control and consistency in sustaining compliance regulation equilibrium.  

In addition, a number of hybrid cloud providers get industry-specific certifications and undergo frequent audits to confirm compliance. For example, HIPAA in Healthcare or PCI DSS in Retail. Businesses that work with a compliant hybrid cloud provider will have the peace of mind that their infrastructure meets all the required standards. 

2. Scalability and Flexibility 

Elasticity 

The term ‘Elasticity’ means the capability of an organization to scale computing resources up and down as per the organization’s computer computing needs. In the case of hybrid solutions, an organization cloud can scale their resources upwards during peak times and scale them back when demand is low. This helps the organization optimize costs and improve performance. This type of elasticity helps an organization respond to sudden demand spikes without permanently over provisioning their infrastructure.  

Workload Placement 

The flexibility in a hybrid approach allows an organization to choose which workloads to run in which type of cloud (private or public). This gives them the strategic placement of workloads considering in factors like security, sensitivity of data and performance needs, application, If sensitive applications needs to be put in a secured private cloud, while the others non sensitive applications can be hosted in a public cloud to save costs. 

Adaptability 

Adaptability means assessing and meeting demands and expectations of a dynamic business environment quickly and efficiently. With a multi-cloud strategy, businesses achieve varying degrees of flexibility using different clouds for different use cases. Also, because these solutions use open standards and APIs, businesses can integrate different cloud environments without vendor lock-in. 

3. Cost Optimization 

Cost Efficiency 

With hybrid cloud systems, businesses get the flexibility to determine the most efficient and effective cloud service to use at any given time to optimize costs since they get the most effective services thanks to the combination of the public and private cloud infrastructures. The most effective and efficient services of the cloud private and public services can be evaluated and the businesses can select which workloads they prefer to be maintained on-premises and which workloads they want moved to the public cloud on a case-by-case basis, streamlining costs and minimizing spending inefficiencies. 

Furthermore, businesses get to enjoy a pay-per-use pricing system which public cloud providers tend to offer and this is definitely advantageous to the businesses. Pay-per-use pricing pricing systems allows businesses to control their costs since they pay for the services they actively use and this allows the businesses to manage their workloads and have more control. The pay-per-use pricing is therefore not limited to managing the costs of the businesses but also optimizing flexibility. 

Resource Optimization 

Mixing the public and private systems allows organizations to gain the extent of resource optimization that they would not have achieved in a system with a limited cloud infrastructure. For example, with the public cloud, businesses can host the highly dynamic workloads of their web applications which require a lot of scalability and infrastructure. Private cloud systems would be more effective in hosting some applications and data that are not sensitive or do not require much in the processing power. 

Likewise, with a hybrid approach, companies can avoid vendor lock-in by being able to choose different vendors for different services based on their service needs and financial limitations, thus being able to spend at a proportionate level and having flexibility on how to allocate those assets. 

4. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery:  

When an organization suffers a disaster, it can be a natural disaster, a cyberattack, technological failure, or human error when it involves losing IT resources and data. Because of these disasters an organization can suffer from significant downtime, losing money and further losing client trust.  

To improve this risk, organizations have begun using a hybrid cloud approach. This creates a cloud-based opportunity for organizations to keep their critical data stored with redundancies so they can have multiple copies of critical data at the same time. If an organization suffers a cloud failure, they will be able to restore activities quickly.  

In addition to helping with this risk, a hybrid cloud approach also provides storage option flexibility. Organizations can keep the most sensitive data stored at their offices, using the cloud for anything else. This helps organizations decide what their goals are with data and how to allocate it. 

Resilience 

Along with disaster recovery capabilities offered by hybrid cloud, these systems also offer protection from possible outages or other performance issues. They offer the high availability of systems by being able to use different infrastructures like private and public clouds at the same time. 

If there is an outage or slowdown in one of the cloud systems because of maintenance, or a technical issue, the entire workload is able to failover to another cloud system that is available, and business operations can continueuninterrupted. This also helps to reduce downtime on critical applications and services. 

Moreover, with the scalable hybrid cloud systems, the unexpected spikes in demand for computing resources can also be handled with ease. Service disruptions and performance issues that can jeopardize a company’s reputation are no longer a worry because of the availability of extra resources in the public cloud during peak times. 

How Can Nfina Help You with Your Organization’s Hybrid Cloud Environment? 

Nfina’s data protection services provide an effective means of security through a zero-trust approach. Our solutions support fast, regular backups that don’t marginalize your bandwidth usage. Our Copy-on-Write technology stores immutable snapshots to keep track of changes, meaning less cloud resources (computation and storage) are needed in comparison to traditional image backups, enabling more frequent backups to be performed and more restore points available. Our Nfina-View™ management tool makes controlling and monitoring your devices’ health and restore functions far easier than a collection of applications that might not work to recover your data. 

The threat posed by ransomware highlights the necessity of off-site backup storage with immutable snapshots proving ideal; they can be sent off-site quickly and with minimal pressure on your network while also avoiding the need for afterhours back up times. 

Nfina gives you the choice to plan your data protection approach through continual improvements, responsive engineering, and automation. By streamlining how you protect virtual machines, Nfina-Store’s immutable snapshots increase backup performance, reduce costs, simplify management, and reduce data loss risks. By using snapshots, you can simplify backups with minimal impact on your virtual machines.