The recent NetApp Cloud Survey continues to uncover interesting trends in European IT, including the massive increase in the uptake of hybrid cloud. According to the study, more than 50 percent of businesses in France, Germany, and the UK are now using a combination of on- and off-premise solutions. In medium sized British businesses, hybrid cloud adoption has reached almost 75 percent.
According to survey respondents, the ability to shift storage and workloads into the cloud has helped reduce capital spend and increase data security. Cloud is also instrumental in helping build a flexible IT platform that offers support for business agility and changing priorities and workloads.
Only half the story
The cloud aspect of the hybrid scenario is truly flexible, allowing customers to assign and deploy resources in whatever way they see fit. Unfortunately, the on-site infrastructure seldom offers the same level of elasticity, effectively creating a bottleneck that can affect digital transformation initiatives.
CTOs across Europe may be reducing their capital spend using hybrid cloud, but they may not be achieving maximum value.
Extending the cloud in-house
True platform flexibility can be achieved on both sides of the hybrid divide with the use of software defined storage (SDS) technology. SDS allows you to pool storage hardware assets in a transparent, cloud-like layer. You can then allocate capacity in any way your applications and users demand, breaking away from the rigid limits created by traditional storage techniques.
More than raw capacity gains however, SDS brings other cloud functions into your data center too. Native compression and deduplication functions allow SDS to take over the heavy lifting of data storage optimization, reducing the amount of on- and off-site capacity required. The cost of managing storage decreases as a result. And with built-in encryption, SDS adds another layer of protection for data at rest too.
With SDS in place, you will find it even easier to transfer resources and capacity on- and off-site in line with demand, even replicating to multiple cloud providers to increase resiliency and availability. And in line with cloud purchasing preferences, you can continue to reduce capital spend by redeploying existing assets into the SDS layer. This gives you much-needed capacity, and the ability to use it in any way you need.
Next steps
To learn more about hybrid cloud, SDS and how they can work for your business, please get in touch.
– See more at: https://www.cds.net/blog/2017/03/hybrid-cloud-is-consuming-europe/#sthash.o9gEeM7M.dpuf