Top 3 Ways the Hybrid Cloud Improves Business
Cloud solutions help your business save money by providing scalable storage, bandwidth, and processing power; improving your access to important files; and automates many IT tasks. The three cloud options—public, private, and hybrid clouds—each have advantages depending on your business’ needs. When compliance, flexibility, and savings are your primary requirements, a hybrid cloud solution may be for you. This is how each benefit can help your business:
1. Keeps you compliant
The hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private clouds. This means businesses in highly regulated industries (such as healthcare) with compliance requirements regarding data residency (such as HIPAA) can leverage the private cloud for those sensitive workloads, while relying on the cost-effective public cloud for nonregulated operations.
Take banking, another industry that’s strictly regulated: A&P Financial (famous as Rush N Cash), the largest loan lender in Korea, expanded its business to China and decided to implement a credit scoring system customized to local market conditions. A credit scoring system entails a great deal of data analysis and corporate risk management, which makes it an ideal workload for the cloud—but which cloud?
If your company experiences an unexpected spike in usage of an in-house server, the workload can be passed off to the public cloud.
According to Lee Seowon, Director at NICE Information Service, “The hybrid model is ideally suited to enabling the expansion of A&P Financial across Asia, including China, because in this model, only data that can be delivered across countries, like ID numbers, is stored on the public cloud.” Lee says the biggest advantage of the hybrid model is that it complies with regulations but carries no security risk. (Learn more about A&P Financial’s experience with the hybrid cloud here).
2. Keeps you flexible
The hybrid cloud lets your business be more agile. If your company experiences an unexpected spike in usage of an in-house server, the workload can be passed off to the public cloud. This way, your company avoids the additional cost of having to purchase new server hardware. In addition to being agile, the hybrid cloud is also scalable, which means it’s well suited for businesses with unpredictable peaks.
Callaway Golf, one of the world’s largest makers of premium golf products, needed a way to scale up quickly: “During and after a high-profile golf tournament, there’s a great deal of interest in our product and our websites receive a lot of hits,” said Dan Cowles, Manager of Solution Development for Callaway Golf. The company’s IT infrastructure was located in its Carlsbad, California, headquarters but couldn’t scale to meet increased traffic fast enough. “Consumers and resellers could experience slow response times and even downtime,” said Cowles.
The company sought a hybrid solution to eliminate the slowdowns and be able to scale infrastructure quickly. This way, the company could proactively improve customer experience. “It’s especially valuable in responding to requests in non-US regions, because it’s difficult to set up infrastructure in Carlsbad and provide remote access to those applications,” said Cowles. (Learn more about Callaway Golf’s experience with the hybrid cloud here.)
3. Saves you money
With the hybrid cloud you don’t have to ditch all your old systems. Instead, a hybrid solution integrates your legacy technology, so you can work between old and new systems. Because the hybrid model lets you tap into the public cloud for immediate projects and scaling, your business can carry out these tasks quickly for less than it would cost to use your local IT infrastructure.
A hybrid solution integrates your legacy technology, so you can work between old and new systems.
As Cushman & Wakefield (a global real estate group) grew, it acquired more expensive hardware than it wanted to deal with. “We are a global commercial real estate firm,” said Craig Cuyar, Global CIO for Cushman & Wakefield. “We want to make investments that support our core business, and buying and managing servers is not our core business.” It came down to where to put company dollars: “We didn’t want to invest our money in hiring more IT people; we would rather hire brokers. We had to find a smarter, more efficient way to operate,” said Cuyar.
The company wanted to do away with its own servers but it wasn’t realistic to do this, 100 percent, right away. Instead, the company gradually moved workloads to the cloud. Nonetheless, the results were impressive: Cushman and Wakefield reduced IT costs by 75 percent. According to Cuyar, “with cloud computing, we’re using our IT assets far more efficiently. We’re not investing in massive piles of hardware that sit idle most of the time. We have a compact reservoir of IT resources that we can dynamically allocate when and where needed.” (Learn more about Cushman and Wakefield’s experience with the hybrid cloud here.)
Source: http://blogs.microsoft.com/work/2014/07/14/top-3-ways-the-hybrid-cloud-improves-business/