by Argantic CEO Garry Ackerman
Cloud has become the catalyst for innovation, companies are moving beyond operational efficiency to create new products and offerings, leveraging the unique capabilities of cloud to differentiate themselves. Cloud migration is inevitable, it can help them drive faster innovation, enhance security, optimise costs and achieve sustainable outcomes.
Businesses that strategically leverage the hybrid cloud can capture significant value, value that differentiates them from their competitors with improved time to market and flexibility in managing costs and scale.
More than 90% of companies use the cloud in some way, but every company moves to the cloud at a different pace and has different strategies and priorities for what needs to be deployed to the cloud.
Some will adopt cloud computing to solve an urgent business need; others will have a longer term, planful cloud migration. Either way, the ongoing effort to improve business operations and create an agile development process can have organisations working in IT environments that span across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge infrastructure.
Cloud provides nearly 90% cost saving
Argantic recently assisted a client with a cloud migration. The Azure option over a 36-month period was R30 000 per month, equating to around R1-million over this period. Alternatively, the cost of the new hardware alone – excluding services, aircon, power backup, support agreements, insurance etc. – would have been around R9-million.
Hybrid cloud strategy
While some may argue that hybrid cloud is a stepping-stone to a fully in-the-cloud business, many companies recognise that a hybrid cloud strategy is not transitional, but a part of optimising infrastructure over a wide variety of considerations. Hybrid cloud infrastructure is a natural evolution of information technology that typically happens at a gradual pace.
Companies transition some of their hardware and software to cloud services and technologies, resulting in a computing environment that combines on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge computing, using software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Many enterprise IT managers – as many as 85% according to one study – have focused on hybrid cloud as the best model for their business.
True integration
A key challenge for these companies, however, is providing a truly integrated solution across their environments for users, developers, and administrators. To help businesses deal with the increasing complexity of blended infrastructure, often with tens of thousands of applications, IT managers need to manage and maintain environments that span on-premises technology, multi-cloud services, and edge devices.
This challenge is particularly serious for companies with legacy IT assets – or those with complex regulatory or edge computing requirements – that must keep up with the pace of innovation.
On-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud or at the edge, businesses can now create secure, future-ready cloud solutions on Azure. It helps them manage their infrastructure more efficiently, reduce costs, and achieve global scalability. With a secure and seamless hybrid cloud on Azure, they can now comply with local and industry regulations.
To help IT teams respond to the need to work efficiently in a complex environment, Azure offers services that help them to govern and manage across their environment, build apps and deploy them to any location, deploy and manage Azure services, and deliver security across the organisation.
With the ability to use on-premises, multi-cloud, or edge technologies to develop, deploy, manage, and secure their application infrastructure, Azure hybrid cloud gives the IT team the ability to easily integrate a variety of technologies in a scalable, reliable, and efficient architecture.
As companies push to digitally transform their businesses, hybrid computing is playing a significant role. That’s why your hybrid cloud strategy must evolve to enable innovation anywhere, while providing a seamless development, deployment, and ongoing management experience across all distributed locations.
Greater control
Businesses that successfully migrate operations to the cloud and augment operations with on-premises technology will have greater control over applications and will see a reduction in deployment and management costs. The result is more flexible operations, a standardised set of shared tools and services, and lower costs for the business.
Businesses rely on a hybrid cloud approach for many different reasons. And as more business operations and applications expand to include edge devices and multiple clouds, organisations are faced with the reality of having hundreds to thousands of applications, running across a wide range of infrastructure, spanning on-premises data centres, multi-cloud, and the edge.
Companies focused on hybrid cloud infrastructure should:
- Build on their terms: Deliver application innovation with ultimate flexibility, build any application and deploy consistently to wherever it’s needed across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge.
- Operate seamlessly: Operate your on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments like a single environment and seamlessly manage all your resources with a single control plane in Azure.
- Secure their enterprise: Implement integrated Azure security across your organisation with confidence, get comprehensive security management, gain AI-enabled threat protection, and enable single sign-on access.
Security
To build an optimal hybrid cloud infrastructure, businesses need to create a reliable, efficient, and secure foundation. Security, data privacy, and compliance are top of mind for business leaders in every industry as cyberattacks continue to rise. Azure offers security from the ground up, backed by a team of experts, and proactive compliance trusted by enterprises, governments, and start-ups.
Azure is the cloud to trust, it provides multi-layered security across data centres, infrastructure and operations. Microsoft has invested more than US$1-billion in research and development and has thousands of security experts monitoring to safeguard critical data.
