In virtually every industry, the organisations that can successfully leverage data are rising to the top. They’re leading in innovation, efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profitability. It naturally follows that smart data management has become a critical component of business operations for most companies. As the volume of available data continues to grow and the ability to analyse it expands, organisations need flexible, scalable, and cost-effective storage solutions more than ever. For many, hybrid cloud storage offers an ideal solution that combines the advantages of on-premises and cloud storage environments.
What Is Hybrid Cloud Storage?
Hybrid cloud storage is a data management framework that integrates on-premises infrastructure with public and/or private cloud services. This approach allows businesses to store critically important data on local servers while leveraging the cloud for scalability and flexibility. However, to do that efficiently, organisations need a seamless experience that simplifies management, enhances security, and optimises performance. That’s where hybrid cloud storage solutions add substantial value.
Key benefits of a robust hybrid cloud storage solution include:
- Flexibility: IT departments can simply and easily allocate resources based on workload demands and specific data management requirements.
- Scalability and elasticity: Businesses can quickly and easily expand or contract storage resources to meet their immediate needs, without investing in new hardware and making long-term commitments to excess capacity.
- Data control: Organisations can keep highly sensitive data on premises while storing less critical data in the cloud.
Key Features of Hybrid Cloud Storage
Organisations that use a combination of cloud and on-premises storage without a hybrid storage solution are likely to encounter certain challenges, such as inconsistent management interfaces, data silos, and challenges with integration.
Hybrid cloud storage solutions eliminate those problems by offering a single environment for managing, securing, and integrating your data, wherever it might be located. A powerful hybrid cloud solution, for example, can simplify data synchronization between on-premises and cloud environments, ensuring consistent availability and accessibility of your data.
The best hybrid cloud solutions offer automated data tiering, which optimises performance by dynamically moving data to the best storage tier based on usage patterns. This balances the need for rapid data access with the economic benefits of using cost-effective storage media for lower-priority data.
Enterprise-grade hybrid cloud solutions offer encryption and access controls to support regulatory compliance and ensure data privacy. They also support compliance with data sovereignty laws by enabling companies to store specific kinds of information exclusively on premises.
Hybrid cloud solutions also offer robust disaster recovery options with cloud redundancy, ensuring business continuity with automatic failover capabilities.
Perhaps most importantly, the hybrid cloud offers a unified approach to managing storage resources, wherever they may be located, with centralized management dashboards for monitoring storage performance.
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Storage
Hybrid cloud storage provides numerous benefits that make it an especially attractive solution for today’s organisations:
- Cost-effectiveness: Hybrid cloud storage minimizes the need for on-premises hardware, which reduces large capital outlays. Businesses can choose to expand capacity via the cloud, paying only for the cloud resources they use.
- Scalability and performance: Hybrid cloud enables organisations to scale resources up or down quickly and easily, based on immediate needs. It accomplishes this while also ensuring high performance using tiered data distribution strategies.
- Improved data security: Organisations can maintain their most sensitive data on premises, keeping vital information within their direct physical control. For cloud-based storage, they can leverage cloud-based security features such as encryption and multi-factor authentication.
- Enhanced collaboration: Remote access to data makes it easier for teams to collaborate, especially across multiple locations. Hybrid cloud offers seamless data sharing capabilities, simplifying the user experience.
Challenges and Considerations
Despite its benefits, implementing hybrid cloud storage comes with challenges that businesses must address.
Data governance, for example, is drawing increased attention, as organisations struggle to comply with regulations like GDPR and industry-specific data privacy protections like HIPAA, FERPA, and GLBA. The right hybrid cloud solution, though, can simplify data governance by supporting data sovereignty, on-premises storage of highly sensitive data, and more.
Integration can be more complex for businesses that use cloud storage along with legacy IT infrastructure. The best hybrid cloud solutions offer seamless integration capabilities that eliminate this problem.
Finally, it can be difficult in some cases to manage costs effectively, especially when working with various vendors and cloud pricing models. Some hybrid cloud solutions include cost monitoring tools that help organisations avoid unexpected expenses.
How to Implement Hybrid Cloud Storage
Successfully implementing hybrid cloud storage requires careful planning and execution. Here are the key steps you need to follow:
- Assess business needs: Identify storage requirements based on data growth, security, and performance needs, then determine which workloads are best suited for on-premises and cloud environments.
- Choose the right providers: Look for reliable hybrid cloud providers that offer strong security and integration capabilities. Pure Storage, for example, offers a comprehensive hybrid cloud solution capable of addressing a complete range of requirements.
- Develop a data migration strategy: Create a phased migration plan to relocate select data without disruptions. Consider using automated tools to ensure smooth data transfers.
- Establish clear security and compliance policies: Implement robust security measures such as encryption and access controls, then audit your storage environments routinely for compliance.
- Monitor and optimise performance: Use the monitoring and optimisation tools built into your hybrid cloud storage solution to measure performance and make the most of your resources. Continuously review and adjust storage policies based on your evolving business needs.
Conclusion
Hybrid cloud storage offers a powerful solution for businesses seeking flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency in managing their data. By integrating on-premises and cloud resources, organisations can achieve enhanced security, improved collaboration, and seamless scalability.
Successfully implementing hybrid cloud storage requires careful planning, but with the right approach, businesses can unlock its full potential. Pure Storage offers a unified hybrid cloud experience that enables seamless data mobility and advanced storage capabilities across multiple environments. Explore Pure Storage hybrid cloud solutions to discover how your organisation can benefit from a modern, agile storage strategy.
