As a result of technological advances, companies must always be one step ahead if they want to remain competitive. One way is through the use of the hybrid cloud, another is through networking within a colocation data centre.
The hybrid cloud model offers the best of both worlds: It combines the security and control of a dedicated on-premises infrastructure or private cloud with the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud. Colocation data centres can help organisations leverage the many benefits of hybrid cloud as they provide the best environment to ensure high-quality connectivity between on-premises infrastructure and private as well as public clouds.
A key acceptance factor of the hybrid cloud is the flexibility it gives companies on their way to digital transformation. By facilitating growth and cost-efficiency, fostering innovation, enhancing user experience, and ensuring security and compliance, cloud environments enable organisations to go digital, enabling them to achieve competitive advantages that were previously unattainable.
New revenue streams and innovations
To provide great digital experiences for employees and customers, a company must keep up with the pace of innovation and be able to quickly deliver customised applications. To do this, the applications must take advantage of the cloud and at the same time be able to integrate seamlessly with existing on-site IT resources.
In hybrid cloud environments, applications have access to native functionality no matter where they run. Applications in the cloud can take advantage of on-premise capabilities, and conversely, on-premises applications can benefit from new cloud capabilities.
By linking cloud-based system and server colocation with their proven legacy systems, organisations can develop and deploy new applications in real-time, allowing them to easily expand into new industries, create new revenue streams, and create new business models that ultimately lead to a better bottom line to lead.
Fostering growth and cost efficiency
As companies invest more time on innovation—whether it's developing a new product or internal business processes—they need to scale, and fast. However, for these growing companies, scaling their on-premise infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming; to make the process cost-effective, companies need to have accurate growth forecasts, which again presents a major challenge.
Businesses need to be able to ramp up capacity quickly when needed and scale back once the peak is over; however, it is very difficult to accurately predict the fluctuations. And with traditional legacy systems, such flexibility is difficult to achieve.
Hybrid cloud environments provide organisations with unlimited resources on demand, allowing them to scale up or down as needed and adapt to the pace of demand fluctuations, while maintaining control of their on-premises infrastructure.
Improvement of user experience
Poor user experiences can destroy a company's digital success as they affect both internal and external users. An organisation's internal workforce is increasingly reliant on software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud services, causing underperformance to impact productivity. In contrast, external customers rely on the online services offered by companies, which can account for the majority of sales and brand equity.
Many companies are constantly increasing power and expertise to provide a better experience for their users. A hybrid cloud environment is part of this drive because it enables select workloads to take advantage of new technologies more quickly without impacting traditional systems. Alongside this, companies can deliver a high-quality digital experience that maintains internal productivity while ensuring a reliable user experience that encourages customers to come back again and again.
Prioritising security
Security and data protection are key issues for companies today. With the increasing number of data breaches and the shift of business needs from local to global, organisations must prioritise the protection of customer data and their own data while complying with various legal regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation.
With hybrid cloud environments, organisations can store their data locally while using a cloud for global expansion, determining the best security mix for their data.
Ahead of the competition
Hybrid cloud is more than just a technology - it's about positioning companies as competitively as possible. The flexibility of a hybrid approach brings with it a plethora of business benefits, from facilitating innovation and new revenue streams, to growth and cost efficiencies, better user experiences, and increased security.
Now is the time for companies to capitalize on these business advantages and stay one step ahead of the competition.
Learn more about how colocated hybrid cloud can help your business stay ahead of the curve.
This article was originally written and published by Business Reporter. The original article can be found at business-reporter.co.uk .