Why Use Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure?

This blog is an excerpt from our recent course created in partnership with Arrow and NetApp, How to Successfully Pursue a Modern Hybrid Cloud Solution. Access the full course here. 

Hybrid cloud infrastructure can offer multiple benefits to state and local governments. Let’s review them.

First is workload consolidation. With traditional hyperconvergence, organizations risk performance problems when they run disparate applications on the same infrastructure. These applications can compete for compute or networking resources or interfere in other ways that impact performance. Hybrid cloud infrastructure allows organizations to run mixed workloads on the same infrastructure while guaranteeing performance for every application.

The standardized technology that binds the clouds together also enables data and application portability, meaning information can more easily flow throughout departments. That promotes better information-sharing and helps increase productivity among agency personnel.

A second benefit is combined agility and scalability.  Ultimately, hybrid cloud infrastructure lets state and local governments roll out new services faster, while reducing the burden on IT staff. It allows for flexible scaling of IT environments, which enables agencies to start off small and quickly add compute or storage capabilities independently to support new services or growing volumes of data.

And that scalability is easily attained due to the operational simplicity of hybrid cloud infrastructure. It creates a self-contained system that only requires one point-of-contact for users and, more importantly, fewer IT staff to manage.  Many of the manual decision-making processes of traditional IT infrastructures are eliminated. As a result, it’s easy to run, maintain and upgrade with fewer trained professionals.

Hybrid cloud infrastructure also automates and simplifies the management of IT environments, cutting support costs and reducing staff requirements. Administrators can set policies to automatically allocate resources to applications, processes, virtual desktop infrastructures or other environments.

Imagine, for example, a state tax board automating a mass deployment of virtual desktops for training purposes. Instead of individually deploying 50 new virtual desktops, a department can use an automated script to deploy all 50 desktops simultaneously. Those same computing resources used for virtual desktops during the day can be automatically switched over to machine learning or other operations during off hours.

Finally, hybrid cloud infrastructure supports cloud migration and operation strategies. It bridges the gap between on-premise infrastructure and cloud-based services so organizations can choose the best solution for any given use case. By integrating a data fabric, hybrid cloud infrastructure enables state and local agencies to easily manage data in this distributed environment.

In our full course, we’ll also walk through the steps you need to implement hybrid cloud infrastructure and achieve these benefits at your organization.