The Key to Hybrid Cloud

PictureCarl Boraman – Commercial Director


Hybrid Cloud is incredibly important since it enables companies to transition into the cloud.  
As a disruptive rather than destructive technology, it allows organisations to experiment and to build cloud services on to their existing services. 

This is particularly important for larger private and public sector organisations with extensive data centres and legacy technology.  These organisations can’t just shoehorn legacy technology into the cloud and equally, the do not want to be destructive by ripping out old technology and replacing it with new.

The transitional appeal of Hybrid means they can test and try applications before moving completely to the cloud. Hybrid offers them a practical and pragmatic approach, where they can pick the best data from their old systems and connect it to the cloud. This delivers significant gains, with less investment and the ability to do more with less. 

By taking these initial steps into the realm of cloud-based services, organisations can achieve all the benefits of anyplace, anytime access to application functionality that the cloud has to offer. 

The Hybrid model has significant benefits for everyone, including legacy vendors. It gives them a way to talk to their customers and join them on this journey to the cloud. And it delivers a flexible way to transition into this new cloud world with its pay as you use service thus providing a more dependable, commercial model which gives providers improved longer term valuation and greater stability.

For vendors, the key is that once a customer has analytics and high value information about the workings of their business, it becomes extremely difficult for them to turn it off.  This is where they can add value and monetise their services.

What the practical steps on the hybrid cloud service journey?

Help and support when adopting Hybrid models is essential.  As a software vendor, we help our partners on their journey to the cloud. And equally, they must help and support their customers to transition to the cloud in a low risk fashion and in a sustainable way.

The Cloud is unlikely to be able to mirror every function of a 2nd Platform system and moving over to the cloud is therefore likely to introduce new issues.

The first step is to undertake research before launching into anything new. Organisations need to be very clear on what they have already and where they want to be. There is no one size fits all solution. The key is to make decisions based not just on the bits you can see but also on the bits that are under the surface. You don’t want the throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Anyone on large IT projects knows the ‘rip out and replace’ mentality is not an easy route and would welcome a more controlled and planned transition that avoids too much disruption. But it’s not just the technology but the human implications. It’s vital that you build confidence across an organisation and manage people’s biggest concerns around data flows and security.

The human cost when moving to the cloud can affect both supplier and buyer.  People often fill the gaps that technology can’t, so don’t think that by replacing a person or a technology with the cloud will be easy, it is likely to present new problems.

The transition to a Hybrid cloud gives vendors the time to reskill their engineers so they are better able to manage information portals rather than mainframes. And end customer organisations can maximise their existing infrastructure and skilled workforce to make the most of these new cloud-based analytics.

The Hybrid cloud is far less destructive than a full leap into the cloud and provides a low risk, win-win scenario for everyone.

As featured in Comms Business: http://commsbusiness.co.uk/features/hybrid-cloud/