Organisations considering hybrid cloud are at risk of underestimating the challenges a hybrid approach can create, since not all hybrid approaches are the same.
Hybrid cloud has become something of a catch-all term and it sounds deceptively simple. Teradata research has indicated that the vast majority of businesses intend to deploy a hybrid cloud architecture. This is a good thing, in our view. However, organisations should be mindful that setting up a hybrid infrastructure can be a challenging and complex undertaking, not to mention the number of forms hybrid cloud can take, depending on the technology mix.
A hybrid cloud solution is a mix of at least two technologies (public, private, on-premise or managed) that are designed to work in unison.
The critical element is that the two or more components can talk to each other, otherwise, it is not a hybrid solution but a siloed one. Without that fundamental connection between the components, having a hybrid infrastructure is pointless.
From our research, a fully-functioning hybrid solution should enable an organisation to:
- rapidly add capacity or shift on-premise workloads to the cloud
- become more creative in their use of analytics through the establishment of cloud data labs
- have cloud-based disaster recovery that keeps data-driven operations online through the automation of failover
- share data between disparate applications or third parties by providing access to data warehouse resourcess
For all of this to occur, organisations must be able to connect users dynamically and synchronise data and objects throughout the hybrid environment. The problem the industry currently faces is that most solutions run a combination of on-premise and cloud but they are not sufficiently integrated to support a hybrid approach where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
For example, if an organisation has one department using a technology in the cloud but has another department using it on-premise, then it doesn’t have a hybrid solution and, as such, is not realising the benefits of a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
With organisations increasingly reliant on data analytics to give their business a competitive edge, it is essential to be able to deploy analytics across all of the data in the business in order to get a complete picture of what is happening and what actions, if any, need to be taken.
Organisations are after a hybrid cloud solution to deliver this functionality but they need to gain a solid understanding of the different hybrid cloud models that are available to them in order to ascertain their value and identify the solution that will most suit their aims and maximise their opportunities.
Alec Gardner, General Manager – Advanced Analytics ANZ, Teradata
