An Excellent Reason to Move to a Hybrid Cloud

Let’s say you’re ready to move to the cloud. You have done your research and have calculated how much money you’ll save in space, energy and personnel. More importantly, you want to free up your IT team to work on more challenging and forward-looking projects. You want to be more efficient, and you want to move more quickly than your competitors.

However, your organization’s executive team is not prepared to make that leap. Maybe they’re nervous about moving their sensitive data to a third-party. You explain to them that a state-of-the-art data center is more secure than your own premises, but they still don’t want to make the decision. Or they agree with you, but they’re afraid that the migration will be too complex, take too long and possibly jeopardize your operation and inconvenience your customers.

In this case, it may be easier to convince your executive team to move to a hybrid cloud model. This will allow them to experience the cloud while still feeling in control. For example, they may want to maintain veteran IT staff and legacy applications on legacy infrastructure but may approve moving a new line of business to the cloud. This may be the best way to save some money while managing risk. Eventually and after a period of time, your executives may approve a total move to a private cloud. Another advantage of this two-step approach is that you and your team will have gained valuable experience in migration, scoping and monitoring of data and applications in the cloud. And you will have already identified a seasoned private cloud provider that you’re comfortable with.

So when you are ready to present cloud solutions to Management, make sure you consider the hybrid approach.