Public cloud has given IT organizations many new options for optimizing their application deployments. As companies adopt more services in the public cloud, they face a new problem of where to place new workloads. Do they deploy them in the cloud, close to the new service, or place them in the data centre where they have investments in hardware already? Evaluating where to put new workloads is the first step IT must make in the new hybrid world. Costs, latency requirements, architecture and dependencies all need to be accounted for. For most organizations, the IT department needs to simplify this process.

Managing the influx of data poses many challenges for companies of any size. One of those hurdles is understanding your data. As your new data is created, what becomes of the older data? Typically, the older data falls off and becomes cold; roughly 10 to 15 percent of a company’s data is considered hot. This provides the opportunity to leverage a hybrid solution to leverage cloud tiering for older data. Moving data from premium storage solutions to cheaper cloud storage can allow businesses to provision more VMs on current storage or help them buy less storage on the next renewal. 

Hybrid networking is a flexible and scalable way to extend your data centre into the cloud. By connecting your on-premises network to the cloud, you get the benefits of both environments, while maintaining control over your data and applications. Hybrid networking provides the ability to scale your network up or down as your workload placement shifts from on-prem to the cloud and vice versa. Additionally, hybrid networking provides you with more flexibility when it comes to connectivity options. You can choose to connect your on-premises network to the cloud via a direct connection, VPN or even a dedicated link.

Disaster recovery and failover are crucial considerations for any data centre. By combining on-premises and cloud infrastructure, a hybrid data centre can provide greater flexibility, scalability and resilience against unexpected outages or disasters. Leveraging your current backup products or offerings like disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) can provide on-demand resources for failover. DRaaS offerings can replicate data and applications to the cloud, providing a secondary site that can be quickly brought online in the event of a primary data centre failure.  When used in conjunction with on-premises data centre infrastructure, DRaaS can provide a comprehensive disaster recovery solution.