With Hybrid IT, while you won’t sacrifice any of the advantages of on-premises or cloud IT, you will gain financial savings. The hybrid IT approach can scale instantly to meet changing business conditions without the need to invest in new hardware and software to accommodate spikes in demand—which can be particularly ideal if your organization experiences dramatic and seasonal workload changes.
By shifting capital expenses (CAPEX) to operating expenses (OPEX), hybrid IT enables you to achieve a more predictable method of managing your budget. As your business grows, you can rein in spiraling cloud subscription costs by keeping some of your infrastructure on-premises. And when you move certain applications to the cloud, you no longer need the specialized resources to manage them. Updates happen automatically and seamlessly, ensuring you always have access to the latest features and security patches
Aberdeen Group reports that small and mid-sized businesses with hybrid IT are more than twice as likely to report having improved IT flexibility.2 The ability to leverage on-premises or cloud—for the services that make the most sense— provides vital flexibility. And for many organizations, a hybrid approach can pay off by helping businesses reduce their overall IT expenditures. Along with increased flexibility and scalability, these cost reductions are probably due to less downtime and reduced IT risks.2
Top 5 benefits organizations experience or expect to experience with
a hybrid IT approach:1
Improved
scalability
Reduced
costs
Increased business
efficiency
Simplified
management
Increased
reliability
Small and mid-sized businesses with hybrid IT are:2
6.3 times more likely to report improved application performance
more likely to reduce overall cost of IT expenditures
3.8 times more likely to have a lower total cost for storage
more likely to have a more agile IT infrastructure
2.0 times more likely to have an increased ability to grow capacity
more likely to have a more agile IT infrastructure
To get to the true benefits of hybrid IT, you need to follow a few best practices to enable well-designed systems with high performance, reliability, and the ability to scale. In hybrid IT deployment, as in all areas of business, different methods work for different companies. But there are some commonalities that work best. In general, a sound approach involves developing a strategy, modernizing your infrastructure, auditing workloads, and prioritizing workloads and applications.
In the following sections, we explore what you should consider when designing and deploying your hybrid IT infrastructure.