4 Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Management to IT 2024

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, organizations have accelerated their migration to a cloud environment to increase agility and simplify business processes. A recent survey found that 95% of enterprises had already adopted or were in the process of developing a cloud or hybrid cloud strategy at the time of the survey (Figure 1). 

A hybrid solution creates a unified system and meets the diverse needs of the businesses. However, hybrid systems can have some limitations in terms of cost and security, requiring effective management. 

One of the latest solutions to ensure the seamless running of hybrid systems is the introduction of hybrid cloud management software.

Figure 1: Percentage distribution of cloud strategy adoption in 2021

Source: Global-Tech Outlook Overview 2021

Hybrid cloud management software helps enterprises develop, deploy, and manage infrastructure and services in the cloud as well as on-premise environments. This article presents 4 ways that organizations can optimize IT environments by investing in hybrid cloud management software.

1. Optimize cloud costs with a hybrid cloud management solution

Cloud resources offer businesses significant benefits including agility in business processes and access to real-time data from any location. However, using cloud resources single-handedly can result in the proliferation of cloud tools and unnecessary license fees.

A hybrid cloud system combines public and private clouds with on-premise resources. Thereby, a hybrid cloud system helps organizations take advantage of the vast benefits of clouds while using on-premise resources and reducing the number of cloud tools.

Moreover, private clouds require additional effort to customize security standards and devote additional resources. However, by combining cloud tools and applications with on-premise tools and running them together, organizations can reduce the time spent on in-house private cloud management and the cost of cloud service providers. 

For instance, using a private cloud service can result in high maintenance costs, while a hybrid system can provide a customized solution.

Sponsored

Redwood’s hybrid cloud management software helps IT teams quickly and reliably manage cloud-based workflows and resources across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Its cloud cost management feature audits historical activities and helps IT teams minimize cloud costs. Redwood’s services are trusted and used by organizations such as AMD, Daikin, Energizer, Epson, and more.

2. Eliminate security threats, data breaches, and compliance issues

Cloud services such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offer many services at affordable prices and can work with on-premise infrastructure coherently. However, using different cloud applications from different service providers can lead to high costs and significant security concerns. 

Security concerns are often caused by sharing essential data with multiple cloud tools and applications having no mechanism to control them. Using multiple clouds in a business environment makes it difficult to track and audit who has access to where and to what extent. 

With a hybrid cloud management tool, organizations can address security and compliance concerns. Hybrid-cloud management tools can:

• Create secure connections between different tools across public and private clouds as well as on-premise resources so that jobs can be transferred between them without threat,
• Locate and back up the data in the most appropriate location,
• Track and report all changes in each environment to help organizations to stay compliant with regulations.
• Be supported by an Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool to ensure the security of tools and applications.

British Petroleum (BP)¹, for example, needed effective data management for its growing operations in over 70+ countries. The company wanted to become more agile in its business operations by adopting cloud services. At the same time, the company had localized regulations and compliance functions that needed to remain on site. The solution was a hybrid cloud management tool that enabled the company to process and make data available across the cloud while remaining compliant with regulatory requirements.

3. Gain agility while orchestrating different tools and applications

In a modern business environment, controlling the entire public/private cloud and on-premise resources is a complicated process. Transferring data from one to another can take a lot of time and delay critical business processes. 

By using a hybrid cloud management tool, organizations can orchestrate disparate applications and tools across any environment. The orchestration feature:

• promotes agility,
• prevents any delays in the transfer of data, jobs, etc.,
• provides the flexibility to instantly expand cloud spaces as additional cloud needs arise.

A private cloud does not provide these capabilities, as scaling and expanding new storage take a lot of time. Hybrid cloud management tools can:

• work closely with any other automation tools,
• enables organizations to automate tasks in real-time,
• optimize job completion.

For instance, Sigma Group², a software and technology company based in France, sought a solution to increase agility in the delivery of its services. At the same time, the company wanted to give its customers more control over their IT environments. Sigma used a hybrid cloud management tool to deploy its products and managed to reduce the deploying time from 2 days to 13 minutes. 

4. See everything on a single screen

Hybrid systems include multiple tools and applications and retrieving data from them can be very time-consuming. Besides, in the event of a failure, it can be difficult to find the error, causing delays in the operations. 

A hybrid cloud management tool can collect and display data related to business processes on a single screen. This helps users monitor real-time data and key performance indicators while finding out easily where the faults lie. 

Istanbul Grand Airport (IGA)³ needed effective management of all on-premise and cloud resources for the world’s largest airport in the world. The project was highly complex as the airport included 750 IT rooms, 5,000 servers, 6,500 network devices, and 40,000 Internet of Things (IoT). The airport manager felt that it would not be enough to invest only in human resources to manage the IT environment of the huge airport. 

As a solution, IGA used a single interface to manage this hybrid environment, and hybrid cloud management software enabled server provisioning and monitoring, as well as compliance with regulations such as the GDPR.

Further Reading

To learn more about workload automation solutions, feel free to read our articles:

• Extract, Transform, Load (ETL): Preparing Data for Analysis
• 4 Ways to Improve Your Business with Self-Service Automation
• Top 7 Key Functions of SOAPs For IT Efficiency

If you are looking for automation and orchestration tools, you can visit our hub for the automation software landscape.

To gain a more comprehensive overview of workload automation, download our whitepaper on the topic:

If you have other questions about hybrid cloud management, we can help:

Resources

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