Today, business is changing continuously, and technology is trying to catch up with these business agilities to meet the time to market. Organizations are expanding their usage of cloud to maintain their competitive edge, accelerate the innovation and transform interactions with customers, employees and partners. The Pandemic further increased the demand for speed of delivery and scale of cloud adoption.
According to an Allied Market Research report, the hybrid cloud market was valued at $96.7 billion in 2023, and is estimated to reach $414.1 billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 17.2% from 2024 to 2032.
Gartner predicted that by 2025 enterprises will spend more on public cloud services than traditional IT solutions.
As per IDC, by 2025 85% of organizations will see a 35% increase in sustainable efficiencies by using software and cloud-based infrastructures.
According to a Delvens report, the global Hybrid Cloud market size was estimated at USD 96.2 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 278.51 billion in 2030 at a CAGR of 16.4% during the forecast period 2023-2030.
CIOs across the industries are busy working with multiple cloud providers, essentially to retain what works and what to improve across an organization’s cloud estate. One of the fundamental decisions they need to make is how to balance the on-site, remote, public and private elements of that combination. CIO’s need to derive a strategy to adopt emerging technologies to provide more business value than before.
In addition, the CIO’s security concerns regarding adoption of public cloud providers are going down while the concerns regarding Vendor lock-in are trending up. The organization does not want to put all its eggs in one cloud provider’s basket, to minimize the huge dependency.
The major factors that CIO’s need to consider before promoting a hybrid cloud model across any organization are:
- Does the organization have the right business culture to embrace rapid change?
- What value does the hybrid cloud bring to the organization?
- Will it help an organization with lowering costs, improving processes and better managing security?
- Organization readiness for a new service model
- Does the organization have the capability to address change management in moving to a hybrid cloud adoption while maintaining business continuity?
- Does the organization have proper use cases for hybrid cloud adoption? For example: Usage of packaged applications, disaster recovery setup across the multiple geographies etc.
- The volume of requirements for new application development on existing architectures, and development of next generation applications
Hybrid cloud addresses all the above CIO’s concerns. Hybrid cloud is one of the quickest solutions for addressing agility and speed, in terms of choosing the right workload for the right environment.
Hybrid cloud is not a product or software service. It is an approach to cloud computing that includes a combination of private cloud, public cloud and/or on-premise environments. The combination may include infrastructure, virtualization, bare-metal servers and/or containers.
A hybrid cloud approach is the key solution for organizations looking for cloud migration, managing dynamic workloads, application development acceleration, containerization of workloads, microservices adoption and portability of services across multiple cloud platforms.
Key Considerations for the Adoption of Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud plays a key role in increasing speed of delivery of IT resources to end-users, improving disaster recovery capabilities and bettering resource utilization. Some of the key considerations for the hybrid cloud adoption are:
- Visibility of Current State: Assess the current application landscape and infrastructure across the organization to decide on the cloud migration. A complete application portfolio analysis of the organization is needed to decide on the cloud adoption.
- Rate of Cloud adoption: A big bang approach is not going to fly. Based on the criticality of the applications, the decision on the movement to the cloud timeline needs to be decided. The factors that decide on the rate of cloud adoption are, complexity of the application, data requirements, regulatory and compliance needs, modernization prerequisites, cost implications, real time requirements etc.
- Portfolio Rationalization: Identify the business functions and the applications that are catering to these business capabilities. Re-engineer these business functions based on industry trends and merger/acquisitions. Identify the redundant functionality across the applications and rationalize them before moving on to the hybrid cloud.
- Application Migration: Applications can be migrated “to and from” the data center and cloud using a hybrid cloud model. Identify the applications that need to remain on-premise, or move to private or public cloud. This migration can be temporary or permanent depending on the enterprise strategy of migration.
- Nature of Applications: Applications that change frequently need to be moved to cloud to leverage automated deployment through adoption of DevOps. Applications that handle sensitive data are best retained on premise. Applications with very high scalability requirements because of varied user load, seasonal or timely aspects are ideally to be hosted on the public/private cloud.
- Selection of Environments: Public cloud environments and cloud service providers may not provide the specialized hardware/application components and thus not be a viable option to move the application to cloud. The core idea is to choose the best environment for the application to run, in order to deliver the functionality at the most optimal cost and effort.
- Integration Strategy: There is a need for connecting back the applications to historical data that resides on the on-premise servers that still exist, even though the migration to cloud happens. Various diverse integration patterns emerge as part of modernizing the applications, handing multitude data sources covering structured and unstructured data. All these activities demand the refinement of integration strategy to be follow by the hybrid cloud across the organization.
- Regulatory Requirements: Applications requiring regulatory and compliance requirements demand some of the applications/data to reside on premise. This requires deeper due diligence to select the right candidates for hybrid cloud and the right hosting option for the application.
- Containerization: Containerizing the applications would help in making the application cloud agnostic and move across public, private, and on-premises clouds. Containers and microservices go together like Idly and Sambar, if we prepare wisely. Microservices and containerization of these services deployed under a hybrid cloud environment.
- Cloud interoperability: Integration between several cloud offerings across multiple cloud service providers and cloud types is the key consideration for the success of the hybrid multi-cloud adoption
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Adoption
Hybrid cloud helps an organization with increased flexibility to deliver IT resources, improved disaster recovery capabilities and lower IT capital expenses. The other benefits to organizations are:
- Business Acceleration: Helps to speed up business processes, support collaboration and provide cost-effective solutions to free up IT budgets for innovative, revenue-generating projects.
- Cost Reduction: Helps in reducing operating and capital costs and improves performance, productivity and business agility via a flexible, scalable solution. Organizations can choose the applications to move across the clouds and on premise, based on their organization requirements.
- Reliability: In this model, if one cloud goes down, some functionality will still be available to users from the other deployed clouds. Generally, one public cloud could be used as backup to another cloud.
- Risk Management: Helps in mitigating risk with a single, unified, cybersecurity solution.
- Manage Legacy Systems: Rather than replacing legacy systems, hybrid cloud can bridge the gap between legacy and new, providing major cost savings.
- Scalability: Applications can scale infinitely through adopting a hybrid multi-cloud strategy while keeping the core of the business and data secure through on-premises hosting
The Mainstream for IT
Hybrid cloud has become the mainstream for IT, as more and more organizations are embracing hybrid cloud as part of the IT strategy. A hybrid cloud approach is the key solution for organizations looking for cloud migration, dynamic workloads, application development acceleration, containerized workloads, microservices adoption and portability across multiple cloud platforms.
Hybrid cloud adoption helps organizations lower their infrastructure footprint, improves security, increases resilience, provides zero down time and acceleration in time-to-market.
Therefore, hybrid cloud is not just about delivering cost savings. It is about an organization becoming more agile, efficient and productive. Organizations of any size can adopt hybrid cloud to help with cost efficient and delivery in the business.
The author would like to thank Santosh Shinde of BTIS, Enterprise Architecture division of HCL Technologies Ltd., for giving the required time and support in many ways to bring this article to life, as part of architecture practice efforts.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this article/presentation are that of authors, and HCL does not subscribe to the substance, veracity or truthfulness of the said opinion.
