Many businesses are starting to use the cloud computing technology, which promises a great opportunity for innovation, while allowing continuity at the same time. These two aspects – continuity and innovation are two of the most important elements of business operations. However, a lot of businesses, small and medium sized ones, in particular, are still hesitant about cloud technology and how it can benefit them.
Cloud technology is typically marketed to advertise benefits like improved flexibility, efficiency and even the opportunity for extension. However, these benefits lack the corporeality, which makes it difficult to validate the move to a cloud. That being said, a far more tangible solution are the hybrid cloud solutions for small business, which incorporate a mix of cloud technology, with a mix of on-premise cloud in the form of servers.
What hybrid cloud solutions for small business offers are real world benefits, such as more opportunity for innovation, business continuity, scalability, and a sense of security. All of this can be reason enough for small businesses that don’t want to risk all their data being lost or compromised on a public cloud, to make baby steps towards cloud technology, without risking anything.
Hybrid cloud solutions allows you to back up or/and replicate all of your data to the cloud while offering you a reliable disaster recovery plan. You can access this data even in a worst case scenario, thus ensuring you suffer little to no downtime. Some key elements to consider when tailoring a continuity solution are recovery, contingency and resilience. That being said, many IT service businesses understand this very well and offer continuity solutions into hybrid cloud systems.
More importantly, as your business grows, you’ll have to adjust your IT infrastructure, which can be very costly, and it can put pressure on accurate forecasting in fast growing companies. A hybrid cloud solution gives you the opportunity to scale out to a cloud environment with a specific workload, which can be scaled up and down depending on your demands. In other words, a hybrid cloud solution always ensures performance and efficiency when it comes to the working environment.
And lastly, because of the internet, and the fact that it’s the largest medium, data is no longer kept in a private location and in private systems, and many argue that it can be compromised in a public cloud environment. Well, a private hybrid cloud system, provides increased control in architecture and design and more data security than generic public cloud solutions. Oftentimes, the companies that provide the solutions have their own data centres which are well-protected.
