Digital transformation is no longer a simple statement, but the engine that is leading companies into the future. At the center of these strategies is the cloud, the ideal architecture to keep costs under control and resources dedicated to what the company really knows how to do while having the right technology platform ready to launch new products and services, increase productivity, incorporate cutting-edge solutions, take the customer experience to a new level, ensure business continuity or significantly increase competitiveness. In particular, the hybrid cloud is consolidated as the best of both worlds.

In a simple definition, we can say that a hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that combines at least one private and one public cloud in such a way that, together, they deliver a flexible set of services. This means that workloads migrate seamlessly and transparently between one environment and the other according to the needs of the company at any given time.

No more vendor lock-in or historical hardware limitations: you can get as much processing power and storage space as you need at the right time.

More and more hybrids

According to IDC, the International Data Corporation, 90% of organizations will have implemented some form of hybrid cloud by the end of 2022. What makes this model so attractive, and why are more and more companies implementing it?

The benefits are numerous and range from the ability to migrate workloads quickly and without the need to modify code to the ability to create and deploy microservices or container-based applications in order to enable the modernization of existing software with low risk and high agility.

Scalability is no longer an issue, as public cloud providers enable what is known as «sprawl», i.e., moving loads normally hosted locally to the public infrastructure to support peak demands, while accompanying when there is a drop in volume, so that the company does not need to oversize and pays exactly for what it needs at any given time.

Another pain that disappears is the limit to growth, often imposed by legacy systems or obsolete technologies, Any innovation will surely work integrated with the cloud.

Frictionless management

From a management point of view, operational and security risks are reduced, business continuity is guaranteed regardless the context – something that was visible during the pandemic – silos within the enterprise are avoided, and the complexity of the IT overview is simplified, since hybrid cloud solutions generally include management and coordination mechanisms that, broadly speaking, mean that everything can be managed from a single dashboard, including the different environments, native and container architectures, legacy and new applications, and virtual machines.

Real-time performance metrics also have their benefits: they are the ones that allow finding opportunities for improvement, detecting deviations in performance or scaling resources in an optimized manner.

One of the challenges that companies must take into account is the unification of security strategy and business policies, in order to ensure that they are in force no matter where workloads are deployed and executed, or where users access applications and data from. From a security point of view, aspects specific to hybrid cloud architecture, such as data migration or the size of the attack surface, must be considered.

Agility, efficiency, flexibility, resilience, cost-effectiveness and performance are the features with which hybrid cloud was created for companies to be in optimal conditions to face the dizzying times we are living in.