Cloud computing allows companies to focus on productivity and providing the best solutions to solve business needs, rather than spending money on pure hardware and technical costs. If you currently can’t find a SaaS tool that meets your needs, however, a hybrid cloud approach offers three benefits that are proving attractive to many organizations.
In a hybrid environment, some of your IT infrastructure, services and solutions move to the cloud, where they’re managed by other people, while other systems are still managed by you. This approach offers three main benefits:
- Scalability: The cloud’s ability to scale up and down to meet the needs of your business is an advantage for retail organizations. It allows them to provide instant access to business information across all of their locations, improving productivity. All you have to do is pay to add another user, and they have access to the entire cloud infrastructure.And because the data and processing power is scalable, retailers don’t need to worry about having additional internal servers to support higher traffic at peak times, such as the holidays. It’s all part of your service-level agreement (SLA) with the cloud provider.However, a retail organization probably wouldn’t want to store its budgetary numbers, HR system and other supporting technology within that same cloud. That’s why many of these retailers are using hybrid solutions as a way to store more sensitive business information with cloud providers or in a more secure internal network that provides consistent access and required features.
- Flexibility: The flexibility of a hybrid solution is attractive to organizations that need to drive productivity in multiple locations around the world while maintaining control of mission-critical information, such as pharmaceuticals companies, for example.For their mission-critical data, they’re able to bring disaster recovery routines from the cloud into a more controlled, redundant internal environment. By copying information from cloud-based content management systems to an internal backup, for instance, these organizations have greater confidence that the data is available when needed.
- Improving IT efficiency and budget: One major benefit of the cloud is that it refocuses IT on providing solutions rather than maintaining backend technology. The hybrid environment gives IT greater flexibility in choosing the right solution for the right business need, and allows IT to focus on customizing or assisting the business user to get the value they need from the system, instead of having to worry about scalability and daily maintenance.
While a hybrid solution brings new efficiency to IT, there’s still a strong need for administrators who are deeply connected to both the cloud and on-premises environments, and capable of providing continuous support.
Moving to a hybrid solution may lessen an individual’s administrative tasks, but their role as a “solution engineer” is likely to increase. They’ll need to monitor the status of the cloud platform, communicate with end users and check the updates being made to see how they could interact or interfere with any of the ways you’ve customized or adapted the system for your own work environment.
As you move forward with a hybrid cloud solution, it’s important to communicate clearly about the benefits of changing IT roles, and the ongoing need for talented administrators.
To learn more about using hybrid cloud technology to drive productivity in your digital workplace, download our new white paper, “When A Hybrid Environment Might Be The Best Solution.”
