Top 4 Ways SMB's Benefit With Hybrid Cloud

Today's businesses require a backup solution that delivers much more than a traditional, local only strategy. Given the constant data risks from all directions, it is important for businesses to ensure that their data is protected and that they can remain operational in lieu of a system disruption.

Hybrid cloud is a cloud environment employing two or more separate cloud infrastructures (on-premises, private, or public). This environment shares resources, data, or services to function as one standardized technology, enabling application and data portability.

A recent study from Tech Republic reveals that 75% of companies have moved to hybrid cloud, due to its wide range of benefits. Continue reading to discover the four key reasons why backup, recovery and business continuity solutions based on hybrid cloud model is essential for an SMB.

1. Hybrid Cloud Provides Security

For those businesses with limited IT staff and a restricted budget, moving to a hybrid cloud is the solution you've been looking for. In Firemon's 2019 State of Hybrid Cloud Security Survey, over 50% of Infosec professionals said less than 25% of their security budget went to cloud security.

The security advantages of a hybrid cloud solution, alone, are well worth investing your time and money into. Within the private cloud, sensitive data like eCommerce details or an HR platform can be hosted securely.

It will be monitored closely and protected by your security systems. Within the public cloud, routine files and documents can be stored and preserved by a trusted third party. 

Strengthening Reliability

Small companies that require dependable and immediate data recovery are a great fit for hybrid cloud. Uptime reliability is generally shown in any service level agreement (SLA) with a cloud vendor.

Your business can offload all the time-consuming maintenance and troubleshooting to a provider with internal expertise. This will eliminate the stress and take the pressure off your overloaded IT staff, saving you lots of time in the process. 

Local Backup

Data recovery is something important to think about when transitioning into hybrid cloud. In the event of a natural disaster or catastrophe, data losses can be minimized when backing up to the cloud.

With a hybrid solution, a company’s essential data is backed up locally and then an additional backup is replicated off-site, providing extra data security. The in-house data is protected by redundant sets of information, with the local device being the first line of defense.

In this model, MSPs and VARs have multiple sources to assist clients in data protection, and can emphasize that it is just as important to insure data as it is to insure physical resources, like buildings, employees and other assets.

Improving Overall Security

Hybrid cloud allows SMB's the freedom to place workloads and data where they belong, depending on their audit, compliance, security, performance, or policy requirements. With a hybrid cloud environment, your business will receive automation, access control, endpoint protection, and encryption.

Another great opportunity the hybrid cloud offers is to store any sensitive data into a "private cloud," which lowers your chances of exposure. SMB's can proceed to take advantage of lower-cost, public cloud data resources, where the data is at lower-risk and there is an option for long-term archiving.

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2. Greater Storage with Hybrid Cloud

Businesses can benefit from local storage flexibility, addressing a key concern that many small companies have, with a hybrid cloud solution. Since cloud storage is far less expensive, businesses can retain more data on the cloud and have a shorter retention locally.

With hybrid cloud storage, your organization will be able to separate archives or infrequently accessed data with regularly accessed data. These businesses can cease worrying about storage and turn their attention to their core competencies, feeling confident that their data is secure and available.

Hybrid Cloud Data Syncing

Data syncing keeps one file stored in different cloud locations all up to date. Users can set up a cloud-based file to which specific data is copied. With this folder, the data is accessible through a web interface for others to see.

In the circumstance that a user makes a change to that one file, the data will automatically update to each correlating folder across all user devices. This saves users time in the long run, as they can prioritize their daily business operations instead of wasting time searching for documents, in turn, saving the company money.

Due to a higher volume of employees working remotely, cloud file syncing has spiked in demand. In order to sync data throughout all cloud environments, a data-syncing application is needed. Most hybrid cloud storage platforms offer a "sync folder" in the file system, which essentially copies files in their most up to date forms to all devices in the shared cloud account. 

Hybrid Cloud Object Storage

Object storage is utilized for handling large volumes of unstructured data. This type of data is too complicated to organize in a hierarchal database and instead, is seen as discrete units of data to be stored in a structurally flat data architecture.

Some examples of unstructured date include emails, webpages, videos, audio files and images. This type of content streams continuously from social media, search engines, and mobile devices. Each object is a simple repository including data, metadata, and a unique identifying ID number. 

There are object storage options available for cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments. Hybrid cloud environments are achievable for handling object storage, as a company accumulates object storage devices into bigger storage pools.

From there, they are distributed across many clouds and locations. This paves the way for scalability and better data resiliency across legacy storage platforms. 

3. Increase Savings with Hybrid Cloud

One of the biggest concerns for SMBs when making any sort of technological decision is the bottom line. According to IDC, a total amount of $66.8 billion was spent in 2019 on IT infrastructure, including server, storage, and ethernet switches, for both public and private cloud. Fortunately, hybrid cloud backup solutions are very cost effective. 

Minimize Costs 

The hybrid cloud model is designed to keeps costs low. Companies only need to purchase a local unit while the rest of the infrastructure lies in the cloud, allowing them to scale back on resources according to their needs.

You will also be saving on the maintenance costs by working with a third party service provider. They will take ownership of the hardware and software costs. The only cost to businesses is a simple monthly fee that covers the cost of leveraging the cloud and all of the services outlined in the SLA (service level agreement). 

Cloud Solutions Provider

It’s important for businesses to look for a solutions provider that can offer fixed cloud pricing. The fixed pricing model that will benefit users the most is called pay-per-use. In this model, you only pay for the amount of time or quantity consumed on a specific service. Some additional qualifications to consider when searching for a provider is their level of cloud capability and skillset to relocate your existing data and applications seamlessly. 

Overall, the hybrid cloud is a cost efficient strategy for your business as it helps to optimize internal processes. 

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4. Hybrid Cloud Provides Virtualization
 

In the event of a disaster, whether natural or technical, businesses must be confident that their data is backed up, and that it can be restored in a timely manner. When SMBs experience downtime, they stand to lose a great deal of money as IT strives to bring operations back online.

According to Dave Bartoletti, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, 74% of enterprises describe their strategy as hybrid/multi-cloud today. Hybrid cloud backup solutions offer businesses the best of both worlds, and play an essential part of a comprehensive backup, recovery and business continuity strategy.

How Does Virtualization Work? 

Virtualization is the separation of services and resources within an underlying physical delivery environment in the cloud. To further break it down, you can create several virtual systems within one remote physical system through this process.

When implemented correctly, services can be consolidated, allowing businesses to run more efficiently. Another great benefit organizations can look forward to is minimal downtime as a result of maintenance issues. Updates process automatically, therefore less work is required to care for the system locally.

Why Companies Need Data Virtualization

Companies rely on data virtualization to make the hybrid cloud more responsive and accessible. Marketing, IT, and operations will benefit the most from using virtualized data because it gives them the answers they need to cover many datastores.

As long as your team has mobile access and a secure connection, they will have access to all necessary resources. Since it is not required to connect to a local physical machine, hybrid virtualization is the way to go for sharing data access with all members of your organization. 

Without virtualization, the hybrid cloud would have many flaws and insecurities, ultimately rendering it useless. Virtualization is so important, as it provides a solid foundation for modern computing and entry point for hybrid cloud deployments.

Conclusion

The added benefits of security, storage, savings and virtualization should make the transition to a hybrid cloud solution a little easier, and hopefully alleviate any fears of the cloud. Our team at Datalink Networks can help you seamlessly transition to a hybrid cloud solution without interruption and overbearing costs. Schedule a free cloud migration consultation with our cloud security and migration experts!