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The Why of Hybrid Cloud Hosting

Posted by QuoteColo on January 26, 2016 - Updated on April 12, 2016

By now, you know what hybrid cloud hosting is. As such, in this article we are going to chat about the why of hybrid cloud hosting. For the companies who aren’t sure about moving to a hybrid platform, the following blog will speak to reasons why a hybrid solution might make sense for your cloud infrastructure.

Legacy System Migrations

For the vast majority of small businesses, the reason for hybrid cloud will err on the side of financials. For those small businesses, financials will impact every decision made, certainly when it comes to IT concerns. One of those financial concerns is how to handle legacy IT systems in the face of newer hybrid cloud tech.

The answer is both simple and limiting: most small businesses simply don’t have the bottom line finances on hand to fully migrate their entire existing legacy IT systems into the cloud. This happens because most businesses have signed long term contracts with data centers or networking providers and are financially unable to free themselves from said contracts.

All this being said, a hybrid cloud solution lowers cost through the migration of physical hardware to virtualized platforms, both external and internally held. While most SMB’s can’t afford to break long held contracts with DC providers, for newer technologies coming online, they can afford to offset the cost of legacy tech by virtualizing need.

Reason #1 for Hybrid Cloud Hosting: While all legacy systems cannot be migrated to hybrid cloud services due to contractual issues, for newer tech solutions, hybrid cloud infrastructure offsets cost of existing legacy systems.

Dedicated Infrastructure is Too Expensive and Under Used

Dedicated infrastructure, while powerful, can prove to be too expensive in both terms of installation and overall utilization. For most companies, the typical dedicated infrastructure concept to deployment time frame runs between two months and one year. Once those servers are up and running, a recent study conducted by multiple research firms found that the average use of most dedicated servers is only between 12% and 18%. For a possible year deployment period to only achieve a maximum usage of 18% per dedicated server, SMB’s would be right to approach dedicated solutions with a certain level of skepticism.

average physical server utilization

Furthermore, the same study found even when companies virtualize their legacy platforms into the cloud, overall resource utilization increases to between 30% and 40% only when those resources are pooled.

One of the main reasons why the hybrid cloud is being looked at as the way forward is because it offers companies the ability to the platform allows companies to throw their IT resources into a private cloud offering enabling new server workloads to be created, edited and taken offline with the flick of a switch. When migrated to private virtualized servers, overall server utilization can rise to above 80%.

Reason #2 For Hybrid Cloud Hosting in Chicago: Dedicated server solutions are too expensive and too under utilized for any small business to justify overall cost. By migrating IT needs between public and private virtualized infrastructures, costs drop and workload per server rises to an acceptable rate.

Proving Grounds

For the vast majority of businesses, be they a SMB or an enterprise level solution, the Internet is the backbone of their companies.  With most companies having to rely on some form of programming and coding to broadcast their marketing message across the digital landscape, having an environment that allows for the development, testing and staging of applications is critical. Once that application is developed, it is just as critical to have the ability to move said application from staging to production via a private, Chicago colocation or public cloud platform.

With traditional computing models, companies were stuck on the hook for all computing resources purchased even if those resources weren’t being utilized. This means companies purchased services only to have those resources sit and wait until need arose. As we all know, the promise of cloud services is a company only pays for the solutions they actually use.

people using cloud

In terms of proving grounds, the hybrid cloud model allows companies to build their programs, application and solutions in an active private staging area without ever having to pay for a public hosting platform for live testing. Only when the application is ready for production does that company have to move it to a public platform which it pays for. Through the flexibility of hybrid hosting, companies gain the benefit of higher performance, the lowering of costs and service reliability when launching and building public offerings.

Reason # 3 for Hybrid Clod Hosting: Reliable and cost effective staging, production, testing and development of company products means everything in the global Internet economy.

The Numbers Behind Hybrid Infrastructure

If the aforementioned reasons to invest in hybrid infrastructures aren’t enough for you, here are some overall statistics about cloud usage compiled by Right Scale, Forrester and Gartner Research.

  • As of 2015, 82% of enterprise companies based in the United States utilize a hybrid cloud solution. That number is up from 74% in 2014.
  • Through 2017, the Hybrid Cloud market is expected to grow by 55%. In the same period of time, public cloud platforms are expected to grow by 25% and private cloud platforms are expected to grow by 35%.
  • Of polled respondents, 54% of companies cited using the Microsoft Azure platform for their hybrid needs. 44% of companies mentioned Amazon as their platform of choice. Rackspace and VMware brought up the rear.

preferred vendors Chicago hybrid cloud

With it’s ability to minimize overall reliance on colocation Chicago and public web platforms, to provide true flexibility between staging and production and its ability to perform/integrate with existing company legacy technologies, the hybrid cloud is fast outpacing other cloud platforms as the go to choice for business computing needs.

To learn more about the best hybrid cloud providers and the data centers they operate from, please contact Quotecolo.

Categories: Cloud

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