Since the Covid-19 outbreak, offering organizations and businesses flexibility and efficiencies was the main concern. That’s where the hybrid cloud came into the picture. The hybrid cloud can address every need of major technology companies and help them meet consumer demands. It offers the required infrastructure, platforms, and software to companies.
A hybrid cloud is an integrated cloud service that uses both public and private clouds to perform several functions within the organization. A hybrid cloud significantly increases the versatility and dynamic nature of work. Thus, more and more companies are shifting toward a hybrid cloud to secure data, and applications and achieve large storage spaces to reduce their capital expenditure.
According to Allied Market Research, the global hybrid cloud market is expected to reach $171.92 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 21.7% from 2018 to 2025. The rise in adoption of hybrid cloud in IT service management (ITSM) models, growth in digital disruptions, and shift in preference toward hybrid cloud has boosted the market growth.
Why choose a hybrid cloud?
The prime benefit of a hybrid cloud is it improves confidence in the cloud and helps develop a transformation program as well as carry it out. Some companies use it as a deployment model for compliance, risk, regulatory, latency, or data sovereignty issues. However, today, every organization aspires to include the cloud in their business operation.
One thing is clear, companies are slowly shifting toward next-generation, cloud-native applications that are developed in DevOps and agile approaches. While some companies are still comfortable using traditional applications such as CRM and ERP, they would inevitably use cloud applications. Some applications are more suitable for the public cloud while some are better on-prem. In addition, the advent of containers and serverless methods has offered a higher level of abstraction and portability that no company can ignore. Such requirements define the infrastructure perspective. Thus, the hybrid model has already become necessary for some companies and would lure other companies that are struggling to keep up with next-generation applications.
What are major private cloud vendors?
A few market players dominate the public cloud market. For instance, Microsoft Azure, which was launched in 2017 allows users to run Azure environments within their premises. It has pay-as-you-go pricing and users can develop applications in-house in an Azure environment. In short, users can create a private cloud that has the capabilities of a public cloud.
Apart from this, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the prime public clouds. Since its partnership with VMware, it has slowly moved to a hybrid cloud. The company now allows users to run computing and storage on-premises while connecting to the rest of the cloud services. Similarly, Google Cloud Platform offers users modular cloud services. Now it has moved into the hybrid spaces to offer microservices technologies such as Kubernetes.
What is the future of the hybrid cloud?
Now, the private cloud vendors have stepped into the hybrid cloud market and the adoption of hybrid cloud would increase in the coming years. Technological advancements would play a major role in the evolution of the hybrid cloud. For instance, the incorporation of automation, developments in machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) will influence the deployment of new services and technologies. What’s more, it impacts how an environment should be maintained and managed.
Thus, a new trend has emerged and would continue to exist in the future–vendor collaboration. Even now, several cloud vendor partner programs have taken root. In the future, the collaboration among the vendor would increase to boost the use of the hybrid cloud.
Having said that, it matters less which vendor or model an organization uses. If the company aims for growth and keeps track of objectives and overall cost, it would turn its attention toward the hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud and support of the right cloud partner can help companies optimize their cloud investments and help achieve set goals in a secure, compliant, and effective way.
From cloud-first to automation- and AI-first, we live in a world where rapid technological acceleration would continue to happen. The hybrid cloud offers the best of both worlds. It offers flexibility and agility for public clouds and security and self-management of private clouds. Thus, a company must evaluate its cloud requirements, data-related norms, and its objectives for the future. This way, companies can choose when to adopt a hybrid cloud and let go of the traditional cloud platforms.
