Gaining greater control over the cloud network is also crucial. Successful businesses need highly secure, dynamic and flexible on-demand access to their cloud of choice.
Adopting a balanced hybrid solution gives the CIO this bandwidth control and will permanently change their approach to using cloud resources.
We expect this factor to drive cloud adoption aggressively over the next year, with companies from retail, finance, manufacturing and healthcare already taking notice.
The hybrid cloud also helps overcome concerns about the performance and reliability of cloud technology. Businesses want the predictability and security of a private cloud and the scalability and speed to market of a public cloud.
With a hybrid system, IT and R&D teams have the flexibility to move workloads and scale IT resources in a way that makes sense – whether they need the performance and privacy of a dedicated cloud service for a mission-critical launch or the capacity and elasticity of the public cloud to meet unexpected short-term spikes in bandwidth demand.
This flexibility also helps businesses and governments comply with the data residency regulations now in effect in many countries to protect the privacy of citizens’ sensitive personal information.
Using a mix of cloud models while making the corporate network as flexible as the cloud gives enterprises confidence they can migrate their business systems, manage workloads and make best use of their IT infrastructure.
A hybrid cloud strategy will be a powerful tool for CIOs with a focus on business network development in 2015.
By Jon Summers, Senior Vice President, Growth Platforms - AT&T