Why the hybrid cloud is no longer the best option

Many businesses are afraid to move their mission-critical systems and workloads to the cloud, due to multiple security breaches that are frequently reported. However, this cannot be less true.

There are only two types of businesses out there, the ones already in the cloud, and the ones who will be in the cloud sooner or later. The age of on-prem infrastructures is rapidly coming to an end, as the benefits of the cloud — high availability, scalability, virtualization, and cost-efficiency — are too large to neglect.

However, many businesses are concerned with the constantly revealed cases of cloud security breaches (like the regularly updated celebrity naked photo leaks or the infamous Pentagon security cloud security breach that happened in the November of 2017). Cases like that seem to heat the doubt of the rationality of moving your business-critical data to the cloud.

However, as it comes out, the aforementioned cloud security breaches were totally the users’ fault and had nothing to do with the established cloud security practices. The celebrities who got their nude photos leaked just used their birth date as a password, or the name of their favorite dog, or the title of a favorite group as a secret question for the password recovery. The Pentagon cloud specialists did not use the security features AWS provided to them and left the secret data exposed on the server that could be accessed directly by guessing the link.

Thus said, cloud security, which is the main concern of businesses afraid of moving to the cloud, turns out to be equal to the on-prem data center security if used right. Quite contrary, it is the on-prem data center personnel and your internal IT department who have to invent the wheel to comply their security procedures with the level of the public cloud security.

Advantages of hybrid cloud

There indeed are certain hybrid cloud advantages that justify its use:

• On-prem infrastructure allows processing huge data sets internally, avoiding the exorbitant payments for the traffic
• Data transfer speed can be very high, as the clients and the servers are positioned inside one network and are not limited by the Internet provider’s channel bandwidth
• Some processes and operation require low latency, which cannot be guaranteed when the signal travels between on-prem servers and cloud systems

These and some other reasons have led to a steadily growing hybrid cloud market, which is predicted to reach $92 billion by 2021. Thus said, following this path is quite a viable strategy for the next 5 years, yet sooner or later hybrid infrastructure must be dropped. Why?

Not the hybrid cloud, but multi-cloud

According to 2017 State of the Cloud report from RightScale, 85% of enterprises use multi-cloud strategy. Why so? Because it helps avoid vendor lock-in, keeps the systems flexible and versatile, allows saving even more costs by utilizing various promos and limited time offers from AWS or Azure, GCP or DigitalOcean. These solutions might include hybrid cloud infrastructure, yet they mostly combine various public clouds.

Actually, AWS or GCP have already addressed all the concerns of the corporate business and covered them in their SLA. When you choose one of the leading cloud service providers, you pay them for the security of your data and safety of mind — and don’t care what happens in the background, it just works without any operational or managerial overhead from your side.

The fact that Azure serves 90% of the Fortune 500 companies speaks for itself. Companies like these pay utmost attention to their business security, and using the public cloud is a sign of trust in its security measures.

Final thoughts on why the hybrid cloud might be obsolete

As you can see, building the hybrid cloud infrastructure can be a viable choice for many businesses, at least for the time being. However, just as the private cloud before them, hybrid cloud solutions will have to give way to the public cloud eventually.

Thus said, why not go for the multi-cloud approach at once? What are your thoughts on the topic? Did your business already complete its cloud transition? What way did you choose and what were the results? Please share your experience in the comments below!

Why the hybrid cloud is no longer the best option was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.