How hybrid mode in Cloud strategy can be life saver.
All of us know how businesses across world are moving to cloud based infrastructure for their tech needs. While cloud-based strategies come with huge benefits, it brings along its own set of challenges ranging from migration cost, ongoing maintenance, technical capabilities etc.
Also, most important of all, reluctance to trash the on-premise servers overnight. Imagine a small or mid size company, which has IT infra of 30-40 servers. It is definitely not wise to declare them unusable.
The Saviour: HYBRID
While for businesses to survive and thrive, embracing to cloud is inevitable. However, it should be done in phased manner. Hybrid approach comes to rescue. This approach brings best of both (on-premise & cloud) worlds to the table.
All of us know that hybrid cloud solution is one where an organization uses a combination of on-premise and cloud (private & public) services.
Without delving in to theoretical details, lets discuss some practical scenarios which we @TechFrolic faced and were able to address by leveraging hybrid strategy which effectively keeps spends on cloud infra in check, thereby keeping our clients happy 🙂
Case Study#1: Temporary Scalability
If you follow @Shark Tank India, do you remember Ayurythm company showed up with their product on Shark Tank and what happened to their app next day:
This is exactly what happened to one of our e-commerce customer.
Consider an e-commerce business which hosts its IT infra on premise. They observed that during last 2 months, they got the load on their servers which was 10 times of average traffic (Active monitoring ? Nagios). Consequently, servers went down and app did not respond. App becoming non-responsive is the last thing any business would want to get in to. With upcoming festive business in the respective country, they were expecting similar traffic but this time around they resorted on “Temporary Scalability” by introducing WARM Server (did someone say Serverless ?). Warm server enables you deal with such traffic at immensely low cost. However, one has to keep cloud modeling in a way that is capable adapting to surge in traffic and be able to divert traffic. (more on strategies to manage load between on-prem and cloud in upcoming blogs)
Case study#2: I can’t manage humongous storage
We observe this scenario frequently in modern web & mobile apps. Most apps have features whereby users submit binaries in the form of images, photos, videos, docs etc. Over a period of time, this piles up and results in humongous data which is unmanageable if strict policies are not applied. (Our 2 AM story for later date 😊 )
Cloud storage services like AWS S3 provide automated management of this data at very low price. And most importantly it is pay as you go, so you don’t have worry about extending storges.
- Fast delivery which results in super quick streaming (since it is done through CDN)
- Automated Archival policy
- Easy to scale
- Economical (cost friendly)
More on how storage policies like archival, accessibility etc. can be applied in upcoming blog.
Case Study#3: I can’t host my data on Cloud
Many companies, due to regulatory requirements or out of their own fear, prefer to host data themselves. Hybrid works best in such scenarios where web servers are hosted on cloud while databases (and other storages) can be hosted on-prem.
Many businesses prefer to adopt a strategy where they want to be in full control of their privacy. They architect their solution in a way that confidential data like PII, are hosted on local servers while non critical and static data is hosted on cloud. This is explained very beautifully by Solution Architects at AWS in this article
While above 3 case study highlights the advantages of Hybrid approach, there are scenarios which are best suited for on-prem and cloud approach as well. So there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to IT infra strategies.
TechFrolic is equipped with necessary technical competency which makes our customers prefer us for their cloud resourcing needs. We offer cloud technology services from consultation, migration to cloud-managed and support services. We aim to provide technology solutions and services that are specially tailored to address the challenges of each of our clients’ businesses and answer for their digitalization and process automation. Contact our team today for consultation.
