Few would argue that public cloud doesn’t represent a revolution in IT procurement. But while it is scalable and convenient, it is not always cheap. In fact, 22% of enterprise decision-makers surveyed in 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud, Hosting & Managed Services, Workloads and Key Projects 2018 study have moved some data from public cloud back to private cloud. Nearly a quarter of those did so because of spiraling costs. A combination of both public and private cloud in a hybrid model can reduce costs while enabling scalability.
451 Cloud Price Index research suggests that private cloud can be cheaper if run efficiently, but this can sometimes come at the expense of on-demand scalability. On the other hand, public cloud enables incredible scalability – for those that need it – but often at the expense of predictability, performance and low total cost. A unified hybrid cloud can achieve this ‘best of both worlds’ by securing predictable, inexpensive capacity as a baseline for most day-to-day requirements, with the freedom of being able to consume on-demand public cloud when demand grows beyond capacity. Economically, this provides benefits, not just in terms of cost savings but also through the business value of more predictable performance, a better customer experience and seamless delivery of workloads across different venues.
