A couple of weeks back, when Microsoft announced its Q2 results, a large part of the focus was on its cloud revenue. In a Wall Street Journal article, Gartner analyst Merv Adrian had an interesting quote describing Microsoft’s strategy of having a foot in the cloud and a foot in traditional IT:
“It’s going to be a very long time before people are living in both worlds…”
If you think about it, however, isn’t that quote really getting at what the hybrid cloud is all about? The hybrid cloud was created for companies that want to live in both worlds.
The hybrid cloud is commonly defined as the combination of an on-premise cloud or IT operation and a public cloud service. Companies in all industries have been moving some aspects of their operations away from traditional IT and data center functions to the cloud – but usually not everything. The reasons vary – some companies have security and privacy regulations to deal with, others simply don’t have massive amounts of data or applications that need to be available outside of their systems, some find it cheaper to keep things in-house, while others still remain skeptical and have traditionally been slow moving to adopt new technologies.
This is why the hybrid cloud makes sense for so many companies – you get the benefits of the cloud in the areas where you want it, as well as the security and management control for the areas where that’s most important to your organization. In essence, you’re living in both worlds: cloud and non-cloud.
According to Gartner, some 50 percent of large enterprises are expected to choose hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017, further backing up the growing interest in this version of the cloud.
Here at Markley Group, our infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, Markley Cloud Services (MCS), helps companies take advantage of the hybrid cloud – allowing them to increase efficiency and security while better managing costs and capacity planning. Utilizing VMware’s cloud and virtualization software solutions, MCS delivers a dynamic, self-service IaaS platform.
Interested in learning more about why the hybrid cloud is good for your organization and how it will let you live in both worlds a little longer? Check us out here or drop us a line at info@markleygroup.com and we’d be happy to connect.
