The Importance of Hybrid Cloud in 2022

If you search for “hybrid cloud” or “hybrid cloud strategy” you’ll find many different approaches to the same solution. A hybrid cloud leverages existing on-premises infrastructure along with the capabilities of a public cloud. In short, it’s the best of both worlds.

A hybrid cloud infrastructure blends compute, storage, and other components from on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, with the public cloud of your choosing —such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. It enables you to integrate cloud-based resources with legacy IT applications, effectively bridging the gap between where you are today and planning for where you want to be.

Since there isn’t a universal hybrid cloud solution, your hybrid cloud experience can take many different forms. Each business has unique needs depending on the technology that is vital to you. After such rapid transformation in 2020, many organizations found themselves dealing with a more complex, less integrated IT structure than ever at the beginning of last year. 2020 saw cloud demand skyrocket. 2021 was seen by some as “the year of multi-cloud”. Now, 2022 is shaping up to be “the year of hybrid cloud”. If so, are you prepared?

Learn more about Connectria’s hybrid cloud solution

Cloud Trends

As rapidly as organizations migrated workloads to the cloud in 2020 and 2021, they’re not done yet. Much of the infrastructure trending usage and growth will be seen in public cloud environments. Gartner predicts spending on public cloud services will increase by 21.7 percent here in 2022 and will account for more than 45 percent of all IT spending by 2026. Considering that public cloud spending only accounted for 17 percent of enterprise IT spending in 2021, this is a substantial increase.

IBM recently polled its followers on LinkedIn regarding which tech innovation they are most looking forward to in 2022. 20 percent of the over 67,000 respondents said hybrid cloud. We also polled our LinkedIn audience to gauge interest in hybrid cloud solutions and discovered while 18 percent had little interest, a combined 81 percent had medium (45 percent) or high (36 percent) interest in hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud provides businesses with critical control over data and improves security by minimizing potential data exposure. Centralize and simplify the management of your infrastructure by bringing your on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud assets together. By doing so, you can streamline operations, reduce your data center footprint, and free up IT resources by leveraging solutions like Connectria’s managed services.

Addressing Top IT Concerns

While the hybrid cloud is top of mind for many as we kick off 2022, it’s not the sole focus for enterprises. In Help Systems 2021 IBM i Marketplace Survey, the top concerns while planning IT environments included security, disaster recovery, application modernization, and more. At the top of the list, were security, with 75 percent, and disaster recovery (DR), with 62 percent.

Whether your business encounters a natural disaster or some kind of cyber-attack, you need to have a plan, have backups in place, and be prepared to protect your business and data assets, as well as those of your customers. Only 42 percent of executives are confident their organization could recover from a major event without impacting their business. Yet 96 percent of organizations with a disaster recovery plan achieve full recovery.

Hybrid cloud enables enterprises to standardize redundant cloud storage, which is an important component of disaster recovery. Using tools like SAN-to-SAN replication and Logical Replication software, Connectria can leverage the same hybrid architecture environment to deliver high-availability disaster recovery options for our clients.

How Hybrid Helps

Increased hybrid cloud interest and demand really blossomed in the second half of 2021. The IDC expects more than 90 percent of enterprises worldwide to rely on a mix of on-premises legacy platforms, dedicated private clouds, or multiple public clouds to meet infrastructure needs. We will continue to see more and more organizations that want to take advantage of the available benefits of public cloud. However, a portion of those organizations also has business or mission-critical data stored in on-premises environments that are difficult to move, here Connectria’s hybrid cloud solution is especially helpful.

Our hybrid cloud offering provides migration and modernization pathways for IBM i and AIX customers looking to modernize mission-critical workloads over time with less risk. It offers opportunities for augmenting existing applications in new ways or the ability to develop new applications that wish to leverage existing data and processes.

What’s unique about Connectria’s hybrid cloud offering is the ultra-low latency direct connection we provide between IBM i and AIX resources and Amazon Web Services’ US-East-1 and US-West-1 regions. With just 2 milliseconds of latency between our Power Systems servers and the AWS data centers, this offering makes it possible for IBM customers to use AWS’s cloud to run X86 workloads for advanced data analytics and to leverage AWS’s capability to deliver multi-region high availability.

Added Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

Embracing a hybrid cloud strategy helps you divest the costs of owning and operating a data center. Operating and managing physical resources in on-premises environments can quickly become cost-prohibitive by consuming resources from administrative staff, HVAC systems, physical security, property taxes, power, utility consumption, and more.

Connectria offers a range of options for customers to purchase hybrid cloud solutions. These include managed hosting services for standardized cloud solutions as well as custom managed hosting for hybrid cloud solutions using enterprise-class x86 Servers (Dell, HP, Lenovo). These options give you the opportunity to embrace the benefits of hybrid cloud:

• Delivers better control of security & regulations
• Helps you capitalize on the low-cost approach of public cloud
• Integrates public cloud computing with onsite cloud hardware
• Enables you to operate behind a firewall (similar to the private cloud)
• Leverages scalability to better handle the fluctuation of computing demands

Ultimately, Connectria’s hybrid architecture opens up new possibilities for Power Systems investments for high availability deployments, advanced user experiences, by leveraging AWS-enabled technologies like voice and mobile, and sophisticated data analytics with AWS cloud services to create dashboards and improve business intelligence. It also creates an ideal foundation for longer-term cloud migration goals, without refactoring IBM workloads.

We’re Here to Help

Companies that don’t adopt a hybrid strategy or engage with a partner, like Connectria, will be left behind while their competitors innovate. Our services like remote administration and monitoring, empower our customers to take their future into their hands. Rather than spending their time day to day with upkeep, your team could instead focus on more strategic initiatives, growing your business, and doing the things you want to do.

We are proud of our diverse service portfolio which includes on-premises data center support, a hybrid cloud offering, public cloud support, remote management, and more. No matter where you are at in your cloud journey, we are here to help.

Contact us below to start a conversation about the future of your business.

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