Make 2022 the year of your hybrid cloud strategy
Staying ahead of the curve is a business imperative, especially in today’s world. Today, more than ever, businesses need to think strategically about how they can take advantage of the emerging cloud capabilities and configurations to enable more secure and scalable success.
Despite being a relatively new technology for most businesses, the cloud has evolved rapidly over the last few years. Today, thousands of premium providers are working day and night to make life easier by providing cost-effective, easy-to-use cloud solutions. To continue to innovate and stay competitive, it’s imperative that businesses make cloud computing a central aspect of their business plan, especially heading into 2022.
A quick recap: defining the hybrid cloud
The hybrid cloud is a new way of approaching the traditional private or public cloud configuration. Hybrid is a combination of both cloud services, which gives businesses the freedom to configure workloads in a way that suits their needs and workforce, keeping costs in check while optimising performance. With a hybrid cloud, you can run tools on-site and in private and public clouds, optimising resources and improving application compatibility.
Four steps to defining your hybrid cloud strategy for the new year
Step 1: Take stock of what you have
No matter what kind of hybrid cloud model you deploy, it’s important to conduct a hybrid cloud audit first. This will help you assess your IT landscape, identifying existing applications and services where data and workloads are being generated. This will lay the foundation for your future hybrid cloud strategy. Review each application carefully and try to answer the following four questions:
- Is this an essential application or can it be retired?
- Can we replace this application with another option?
- Is there any reason to leave this application exactly as it is?
- Does this application need to be modified in any way before it can be migrated to the cloud?
Step 2: Focus on your future goals
Defining success will enable you to plan the perfect solution to achieve it. By outlining your objectives ahead of time, you’ll be able to identify the features and capabilities you need from your hybrid cloud solution in order to achieve them. The first step to knowing what solution you need is to review your business objectives, and then assess your current application usage. Don’t go for the most obvious solution; do the hard work upfront to understand what you need, rather than trying to work around it later. No matter how limited or broad your business is, it can benefit from a technology strategy that reflects the same vision and goals.
Step 3: Consider your cloud with care
The regulatory environment varies from business to business. But some common regulations that should be considered include PCI (Payment Card Industry regulation), HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and GDPR (The General Data Protection Regulation). Knowing which ones apply to your business will help you to determine which applications and data can be hosted in a public cloud infrastructure and which cannot. Once you’ve identified which can be operated where, it’s time to focus on where to house your systems. This is not only about making sure that you meet regulatory requirements, but also about being able to scale when you need to.
Step 4: Decide on how you manage and keep your data safe
Using cloud-based data management solutions is an essential way to access and protect sensitive data. They’re secure and can easily be configured to all your business applications. This will allow you to centralise, classify, and manage all sensitive data, regardless of whether it’s on-premise or in the cloud. More importantly, through a reliable and available premium online backup platform — a critical part of any data management solution stack — can help protect your data from threats, keeping it safe and accessible.
When it comes to threats, you need to make sure your business and employees are constantly up-to-date with the latest potential threats. Download our free ebook, ‘Cybersecurity: Smart threats need a smarter defence’, which helps you understand these threats and how to better safeguard against them.
Is your business ready for the hybrid cloud?
As more businesses around the world adapt to a hybrid working world by adopting a hybrid cloud configuration, it’s important to understand how to take leverage of this technology for the future success of your business. Automating hybrid cloud configurations and making them a part of how your business functions is the best way to realise your company’s goals in a timely and efficient manner, while ensuring that all your critical data is as safe and accessible as possible, both in this year and hopefully into the next.
