The benefits of cloud computing are clear, but companies are increasingly opting for a hybrid cloud approach for a variety of reasons. Jozef de Vries of EDB explores why most companies prefer the hybrid cloud route to transformation as opposed to full cloud migration.
The cloud market was valued at a staggering $545.8 billionOpens a new window last year. It’s no wonder: The benefits of cloud computing are hard to ignore for companies looking to scale without taking on the additional burden of IT expansion and overhead. And thanks to trends like remote work, cloud adoption has skyrocketed.
Despite the cloud’s impressive growth and popularity, many companies are choosing a hybrid approach instead of going all-in on the cloud. Let’s take a deeper look at the primary reasons some companies are staggering their cloud investments and the top considerations for doing so.
Results Have Fallen Short
Gartner researchOpens a new window indicates that through 2024, approximately 60 percent of infrastructure and operations leaders will grapple with unexpected public cloud costs that adversely affect their on-premises financial allocations. Since cloud’s inception, there has been a false notion that companies can simply take their on-premises applications or database systems, throw them into containers in the cloud, and have everything run efficiently and cheaply; this is sometimes called “lift and shift.”
But in reality, the cloud is only as beneficial as you make it. Getting it right requires careful consideration and up front investment to gain the efficiency and eventual cost savings most organizations seek. Many companies that hastily moved workloads to the cloud have found that it’s not paying off in the ways they expected. Thankfully, not all is lost: organizations can right the ship by carefully assessing which workloads should run in the cloud and which are ideal for on premises (more on this later).
Security Requirements Vary for Different Workloads
For other companies, the decision to maintain or switch to a hybrid environment is largely driven by the type of workload itself. Industries dealing with highly sensitive data – think financial institutions with banking information or healthcare organizations with patient data – often adopt a hybrid cloud model to address varying regulatory or corporate policies.
According to Gartner’s 2023 CIO and Technology Executive AgendaOpens a new window , information security remains a top concern for IT decision makers. This can raise debate about whether the cloud is less secure than the on premises environments these workloads run in today. While the cloud is arguably just as secure, there are both human and technical factors at play: technical areas can be improved, and perceptions about cloud security can still change over time.