Audit your workloads to determine how much you should keep on premises, and how much can go into the cloud. Consider issues such as processing latency, security, and compliance. Anything not adversely affected by these considerations may be a good candidate for the cloud.
There are reasonable fears about data security, regulation compliance, and the effects that increased cloud usage will have on the IT workforce. According to one Spiceworks survey respondent, “I don’t feel that security in the cloud has reached the maturity it needs to have for my business.”1
In fact, 60% of survey respondents indicated some workloads can never move to the cloud because of security concerns and compliance regulations. Those include finance, accounting, and customized apps; big databases; operations and HR apps; and healthcare information.1
The cost related to managing bigger databases or modernizing old apps also makes IT pros more likely to keep some workloads on premises.1 But that’s why the hybrid approach is so effective: It takes the best of both approaches and marries them together.
Spiceworks survey respondents say the following on-premises workloads would or could never move to the cloud:1
Business apps
Relational databases
Backup, archiving, and recovery
Big data/non-relational databases
Development and testing
Top reasons these workloads wouldn’t or couldn’t be moved:1
Security
Compliance regulations
Cost
Unable to justify the ROI
Amount of time/expertise required to move it