The shift to cloud solutions has been a significant tech trend in the past years as it’s well-understood that leveraging the cloud is vital to stay competitive in today’s business landscape. Migrating to the cloud can offer a host of advantages for businesses, including more flexibility, slashed IT costs, increased efficiency, boosted performance, improved security and development of new competencies. The pandemic only accelerated this digital transformation and the adoption of cloud solutions.
As a result, more managed services providers (MSPs) are transitioning clients to the cloud than ever before. However, many SMBs are still unsure about where to start their transition from.
Start transitioning clients to the cloud with a hybrid approach
The main advantage of leveraging a hybrid cloud approach is agility. When it comes to a digital business, a core principle is to be able to change direction and adapt quickly. Your clients might want to consider combining private clouds, on-premises environments and public cloud resources to ensure smooth business operations, be agile and gain a competitive edge.
The difference between the cloud and hybrid cloud
A hybrid cloud computing environment refers to the combination of at least one private cloud and a public cloud by allowing applications and data to be exchanged between them.
Both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud refer to cloud deployments, integrating more than a single cloud component. The difference is in their cloud infrastructures. A hybrid cloud infrastructure merges two or more clouds, whereas a multi-cloud merges different clouds of similar type.
When processing and computing demand fluctuates, a hybrid cloud setting allows your business to scale their infrastructure on-premises seamlessly up to the public cloud to manage any overflow. Your enterprise can gain the computing power and the flexibility of the public cloud for non-sensitive and basic computing tasks while keeping all the business-critical data and applications on-premises or on a secure private cloud.
Ultimately, a hybrid cloud approach helps an organization achieve its business and technical objectives more cost-efficiently and effectively.
Benefits of going hybrid when transitioning clients to the cloud
While a unified hybrid cloud approach is still arguably in the early adopter stage, an estimated 13% of companies actively use a multi-cloud management platform. It’s safe to say many of these organizations already realize the significant benefits of going hybrid. Embracing the hybrid cloud encapsulates the best private and public models to form a highly efficient, feature-rich and affordable system.
For providers looking to start a conversation about transitioning clients to the cloud, below are some of the key benefits of starting with a hybrid approach.
Employs existing infrastructure
In contrast to private or public clouds alone, hybrid cloud instead leverages existing infrastructure components. It spreads them with an extra management platform layer that offers practical orchestration workloads.
In theory, a hybrid cloud comprises of the following elements:
- At least one private cloud
- Hybrid cloud manager (HCM)
- At least one public cloud
Hybrid cloud allows for integration, deployment and migration of workloads between private and public clouds based on the cost conditions and capacity. In addition, it uses underpinning advancements, including virtualization, automation, containerization and microservices.
Cost-effectiveness
The public cloud module of a hybrid cloud environment offers cost-effective IT-related resources without incurring labor costs and capital expenses. As an IT professional, you can determine the optimal configuration and location to suit your business needs. As a provider, you can offer more flexible options that make transitioning clients to the cloud as smooth as possible. Additionally, both providers and end-users can easily scale, redeploy or reduce services when required, saving costs via increased efficiency and elimination of unnecessary expenses.
Support remote and hybrid work environments
If you want to extend on-premises settings to public clouds, a key motivation is the ability to use resources elastically when required in public clouds to cater to market demands while scaling up and down. This is called cloud bursting.
Customer-focused applications, particularly e-commerce ones, are excellent examples for cloud bursting as the users can benefit from quick scaling during high-demand periods, like holidays.
Leveraging public clouds in addition to private or on-premises servers also contributes to increased availability for end-users, thanks to the distributed nature of a structure (i.e. geo-location zone possibilities) that can ensure performance and bring applications closer to the intended users. A hybrid work structure also enables staff to get the best of both (private and public cloud) worlds, enjoying the advantages of in-person and collaborative relationships while also being able to work on tasks remotely without sacrificing security.
Protection and disaster recovery
Hybrid cloud is rapidly evolving the way enterprises approach disaster recovery by offering the ability to leverage the public cloud as a fully functioning backup destination while keeping a decent level of control over the limits of your private network.
Of course, there are challenges concerning recovery times and security. But a well thought out plan that effectively addresses recovery objectives, data protection and other issues can easily help to ensure optimal performance and effectiveness of your business operations. Hybrid cloud allows for such accommodations in a wide range of applications, including disaster recovery, protection and backup.
Support hybrid cloud environments with an expert partner
Customers today run about 80% of their capacities in the cloud. For MSPs working on transitioning clients to the cloud completely, a hybrid cloud architecture provides a wealth of benefits that enable your customers to secure all of their applications and data. Also, it helps you maximize resource usage and scale along with your growing customer base while saving money.
Collaborating with a competent provider can help you seamlessly transition clients to new cloud environment while ensuring data security. With Sherweb’s professional services, you can optimize at reduced costs with a suitable hybrid cloud solution that can accelerate flexibility and speed without adding infrastructure purchases. Sherweb also helps you with training to ensure effective deployment and maintenance while providing expert support.
Explore our Partner Guide for more ways Sherweb can help your cloud business grow.
