Egnyte in the News! "Hybrid Cloud Is The Backup Parachute To Any Potential Jump"

Some would say you have to be mad to seek thrills which involve bumping into the ground at high speed. Step forward the Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner who proved the power of hope over adversity – as well as gravity, the sound barrier and insurable risks.

While dropping through the clouds is great TV, this was a calculated risk, impacting one former Special Forces volunteer, his family and supporting team. But we are not all in the same position to take such risks.

For example, taking risks with business information, held only in the cloud, is potentially lethal for your business and could impact customers, employees and their families. Worse – it could be an accident waiting to happen if recent outages at Google, Blackberry and O2 highlight the risk of relying on services to deliver your data.

So why do companies take the risk of putting everything in the cloud? Gartner believes in the future, they won’t. According to its experts, Hybrid Clouds offer the best possible economic model and maximum agility for businesses wishing to balance the IT resources they use via public cloud, with those that must be held in a private cloud in the company’s own datacentre.

By definition a Hybrid Cloud service is composed of a combination of private, public and community cloud services offering the customer better security and mitigating risk. Hybrid Cloud can also reduce the risk of downtime by combining the power of the cloud with the relative safety of locally stored data – like a reserve parachute for your business.

By extending the capacity and capabilities of the cloud with a hybrid approach, companies can maximize efficiency and take advantage of publicly available cloud services while protecting critical data that is important to them and their customers. By planning for all eventualities, Hybrid Cloud can leverage value, making the move to a cloud solution less hype and more reality.

The capabilities have already been tried and tested, and media coverage of blackouts, data loss and the inevitable customer backlash of when things go wrong is enough of an argument for many to leave a pure cloud solution well alone.

For enterprise customers the cloud will never be enough if they want the flexibility of the cloud combined with secure on-premise storage. Pairing with on-premise devices means the cloud is married to any number of users, any number of offices, and any number of access points and devices to create a cohesive extended workplace for today’s modern enterprise.

In truth, why take the risk? History dictates things inevitably go wrong, no matter what your SLA or disaster recovery plan. Customers demand a high level of service, data must be kept safe and we must be prepared for any eventuality. The Hybrid Cloud is the back-up parachute to any potential jump we must take as an organisation.

*The original article appeared in Business Computing World. Click here for original article

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