Cloud computing is widely regarded as being the endgame for tech as we know it, and it’s easy to see why.
By shifting computational duties away from individual devices and onto remote servers, end users can have high-end experiences without being limited by the clock speed, core count or storage capacity of their on-site hardware.
But what role does the hybrid cloud have to play in this context, and is the future actually a little more nuanced than some would have you believe?
Explaining hybrid cloud services
From rendering 3D scenes to running software and providing off-site backup for mission-critical data, cloud-powered solutions can do almost anything.
For businesses, a hybrid setup means melding on-premises hardware resources with remote, outsourced equivalents so that the advantages of both public and private cloud configurations are available.
Outlining the benefits
It’s sensible to be concerned about digital privacy, whether you’re a business or a consumer. For companies, in particular, the prospect of putting sensitive information in the hands of a third-party provider might not be appealing.
The hybrid cloud comes in here and offers you the flexibility to retain control over certain data sets internally, while still having the means to offload less precious workloads to external infrastructures as required.
In turn this allows for savings to be made, without compromising on performance or agility. Resources can be scaled affordably via the cloud while pressing forward with whatever in-house allocation of assets makes the most sense.
Dealing with increased complexity
With a hybrid cloud setup, you might worry that a lot more work is involved in overseeing your assets and resources. Luckily, with integrated hybrid cloud observability tools, even an infrastructure that is seemingly dispersed and fragmented can be tamed, tracked and maintained.
Again, this gives you that all-important element of control over your enterprise IT footprint, without the cost becoming a limiting factor. Full-stack visibility is within easy reach, and for both physical and virtualized devices and hosts, you’ll be covered.
Adopting AI enhancements
One key piece of the hybrid cloud puzzle is that artificial intelligence (AI) is part and parcel of the latest and greatest solutions in this space. By its very nature, anything with AI added to the mix will lead to ongoing improvements as time passes, and so the argument for seeing the hybrid cloud as the future of technology is undeniably bolstered by this.
Of course, the other aspect of AI is that it makes it difficult to predict exactly how the market might change and be reshaped going forward. The setups we take for granted today may be rendered redundant by some machine learning breakthrough tomorrow.
Even so, the underpinnings of the hybrid cloud seem solid enough to allow it to survive the unknowable future that lies ahead. And because third-party vendors have the incentive to invest in updating and overhauling their infrastructure more often, the implementation of improvements will lead to a snowballing effect.
Serving supercomputing to the masses
Simply put, it seems very likely that hybrid cloud technologies will define the coming decades of IT, both for businesses and consumers.
For the time being, there remains a need for local hardware to fulfill certain roles that are either not well suited to the cloud, or simply don’t make sense to be shifted over to it from an ideological perspective.
That said, the enhancements available courtesy of a hybrid setup certainly appeal to a broad audience, and with this comes the compulsion to continue developing and expanding the capabilities of this market. The future, it seems, is unquestionably in the hands of the hybrid cloud.