You may have heard about the hybrid cloud, but you may not know exactly what it is or how it might be used in your business.

As prices come down and more solutions providers appear in the market, the hybrid cloud is coming into reach for most small-to-midsize businesses. In most cases, the hybrid cloud will actually cost less than traditional solutions.

If you haven’t considered a hybrid cloud solution before or want to understand the concept a little better before taking the plunge, here is some info that might help.

What is a hybrid cloud?

Hybrid clouds combine internal infrastructure (the servers and other equipment your business hosts onsite) with third-party servers in an offsite datacenter.

The idea behind this type of solution is to provide a business with the benefits of local storage while also getting the benefits of having their data backed up remotely and available anywhere in the world without having to make costly investments in cloud-specific infrastructure.

One of the use-cases for the hybrid cloud is backup. And there are a few great benefits to going this route.

1. Business Continuity

If your business doesn’t currently have the ability to fail-over your IT functions to an offsite data center, the hybrid cloud is a great way to get started without having to make a big investment. Gaining the ability to keep your business running after an outage or natural disaster could make the difference between staying in business or filing for bankruptcy.

And if you’ve already got offsite datacenters and other elements of IT resiliency in place, migrating to a hybrid cloud may be a way to significantly reduce the cost of implementing  and maintaing business continuity.

2. Insurance for your data

Businesses sometimes make the mistake of creating a single onsite backup and stopping there, thinking they are protected against data loss. Unfortunately, a single onsite backup doesn’t do much to shore up the risk of data loss.

If a DVD is scratched or a backup tape becomes corrupted, they may be out of luck.

Using a hybrid cloud solution, backups would take place locally and then get replicated to one or multiple datacenters. Having multiple copies stored offsite ensures you’ll always be able to restore your critical data.

3. Cost

The cost of buying redundant hardware for a remote datacenter, renting space, and hiring additional staff keeps many businesses away from building fully private clouds.

Leveraging the investments you’ve already made and using a third-party to address the remote component is one way to lower the cost of cloud hosting.

Using a hybrid cloud also gives the business flexibility to cost-effectively scale up and down without worrying about purchasing hardware that might need to be offloaded later.

4. Compliance

More and more businesses are becoming subject to regulatory and standards compliance. Cloud vendors have been paying attention to this trend and have built their hosting to match the most common standards like HIPAA, SOX, and PCI.

By working with these vendors you can leverage the investments they’ve already made to achieve compliance instead of having to make your own. You may also be able to leverage built-in processes to meet compliance from that perspective.

Interested in learning more?

If you have questions about the hybrid cloud or would like to speak with us about the specific cloud solutions we offer, give us a call or contact us via email and we’ll help you find a hybrid cloud solution that fits your needs and budget.