Hybrid things are valuable because you get the best of both worlds. A hybrid car is better for the environment but has the performance of a petrol car. A liger has the majesty of a lion but the ferocity of a tiger (not the most useful scientific achievement, I’ll admit). And hybrid IT allows you to use a single IT system that can store sensitive data and support any workload your business needs.
What is hybrid IT?
Hybrid IT – Any combination of public cloud, private cloud, colocation and any other private hardware solutions into a single integrated IT solution
Hybrid IT is an IT system which combines several different IT platforms together to provide a flexible and reliable system that can keep up with a company’s requirements.
A seamless integration of these different IT platforms allows a business to take advantage of cloud and private hardware and introducing new platforms without the disruption and cost of regularly migrating data from one system to another.
It’s quite an undertaking to manage a hybrid IT system and should only be used by a business with the resources and requirement for it. But it’s well worth it if your business would benefit from the flexibility and reliability that hybrid IT provides. A business with a hybrid IT system no longer needs to compromise on which IT platforms are used and can put each workload in its ideal environment.
Think of your IT like a house
Being on a single IT platform is like living in a studio apartment or bedsit. Having everything in one room is strictly functional, but eventually you’ll want to brush your teeth when someone else is doing the dishes. In the same way, operating from a single IT platform will have its limitations; public cloud might not be secure enough for your data storage needs, you might be paying for more than you need if you’re using a private cloud, or you might have changing requirements that your colocation isn’t flexible enough to keep up with.
Having multiple rooms in your house for different functions makes your life a lot easier and having different IT platform for different workloads does as well. You can move a workload to its ideal platform all within an integrated system, and never have to compromise on your IT’s performance, security, or flexibility ever again.
Like a house, you can expand and scale up a hybrid IT system as well, adding in new platforms to meet new requirements without having to migrate to an entirely new system. And unlike a house, you won’t even need planning permission (unless you’re being very ambitious).
Why is hybrid IT so useful?
There’s a lot of reasons why a business would benefit from using a hybrid IT system. Effectively, any situation where a business could take full advantage of two different IT platforms is when a fully integrated hybrid IT system becomes ideal for them.
A very common example of this is a business which needs the flexibility and scalability of public cloud, due to constantly changing capacity needs, but also has some highly secure data they need to store on a private piece of hardware. Both the public cloud and private hardware are essential elements of their IT, so hosting a hybrid IT system in a data centre (by integrating their public cloud and colocation services) lets them achieve this while still having a single unified system.
Hybrid IT is about deploying the right platforms at the right time, so that whatever workload you’re running is on its ideal platform with the security, scalability or reliability it needs.
How to manage hybrid IT?
Working with a managed infrastructure provider is the easiest way to host a hybrid IT system since you can get each of the platforms making up your IT system from a single provider, while getting peace of mind from the resiliency and redundancy that will keep your IT running 24/7. Having your public cloud, private cloud and colocation services from one infrastructure management provider (who can also host these across multiple sites) gives you a single supplier who you can hold responsible and go to for support.
At Redcentric we’re proud to promise our customers 99.999% uptime and we’ve never had a power failure. If you want to explore how our services could help support your business, and potentially adopt a hybrid approach to IT, get in touch to get a free consultation with one of our IT experts.
