People are no longer asking if, businesses should migrate to the Cloud?
Rather, they are more interested in learning what data or applications should be moved? And to which cloud or clouds? And what should the balance be between public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise infrastructure?
Most enterprises have already migrated some portion of their data and workloads to the Cloud. It was the COVID-19 pandemic which accelerated this migration due to businesses adopting work-from-home policies and seeing increased capacity demands.
According to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, 92% of businesses today have a multi-cloud strategy. Additionally, the report states that 82% have a hybrid cloud strategy, and 90% of businesses confirm an extreme increase in their cloud usage.
The Multi-Cloud Environment Approach
A multi-cloud environment is where an enterprise uses more than one cloud platform, with at least two or more public clouds (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud) in the mix. A multi-cloud strategy can be comprised of public, private, and edge cloud computing. This grants companies the ability to choose the cloud providers best fit for their needs.
Cloud platforms can either specialize in large data transfers or have integrated machine learning/ AI capabilities. Additionally, a multi-cloud environment can help prevent outages or errors. This further ensures that companies always have the compute power and data storage needed.
The Hybrid Cloud Strategy
A hybrid cloud strategy combines public cloud usage with on-premises infrastructure or a private cloud (a cloud environment dedicated to one customer). Hybrid clouds enable data and apps to move easily between those two environments.
More and more businesses are opting for: multi-cloud and/or hybrid environments to accommodate varying needs including capacity, accessibility, speed, scalability, security and affordability.
You may wonder why some businesses would opt to run some of their services on an on-premise infrastructure. A hybrid solution is often the simplest, most cost-effective solution for those who already are using on-premise hardware. Often times moving everything to the Cloud at once can be too complex and disruptive.
Secondly, a hybrid cloud environment is ideal when you have a lot of data to process. It provides a balance between performance and flexibility. On-premise infrastructure is typically better suited for real-time applications and processing. It ensures privacy and security, while the cloud component ideally provides fast, easy access to applications needed for daily operations.
Benefits of Partnering With The Experts
Having an expert consultant in database services to assess your specific needs is the most cost-effective approach. These partners can make recommendations on what systems and data should be kept within an on-premise environment, or on a private or public cloud. After some monitoring, companies could find an ideal, balanced environment that provides maximum performance, scalability. and availability.