Is a hybrid solution the answer to your hosting strategy?

Today’s economic situation continues to favour cloud solutions, driven by businesses that are transforming how they interact with customers, partners, suppliers and their own employees. However, adoption of cloud is not a straightforward process for most businesses. Factors like migration planning, security concerns and the business’ general readiness for cloud mean each organisation needs to carefully evaluate multiple solutions to deliver against their unique IT strategy.

Our recommended approach is to build infrastructure around a hybrid model. This allows the business to take advantage of different types of solutions for each type of service – including co-location, managed service and a range of cloud services (i.e. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, public cloud or private cloud).

What is a hybrid solution?

A hybrid solution allows you to leverage data centre services by combining cloud, dedicated and shared, managed and colocation resources. These resources can then be configured according to your business’ needs – including data and network security, compliance, costs and term commitments.

Eight questions that will influence your hosting decisions

Here are the areas that will most affect which approach you take for all of the different components of your strategy:

• Which services should be centralised or should stay decentralised?
• Location: where are your services needed most? Consider country, infrastructure maturity, security, availability and multi-availability-zones.
• What are the uptime and performance requirements for various services?
• What service level and support requirements do you have?
• Are software and solutions ready? You may need to consider changes to operating systems, databases, hardware and virtualization.
• What is the migration plan?
• Consider future adoption of new technologies (e.g. workload mobility, rapid scaling or horizontal elasticity)
• Similarly, you may want to adopt new services (outsourcing, Software as a Service or mobility)

Asking these questions will help guide your choices for which type of hosting is right for the various services that compose your business’ individual configuration. The right mix can offer what most organisations are after: more for less. More uptime, flexibility and performance for less infrastructure, management and services costs.

In our next post, we’ll go into more detail on each area, and also showcase some common hybrid solutions for different industries and business sizes. If you have any questions or comments, leave a comment below or find us on Twitter at @MacquarieTelco.