The pace of business is accelerating. Mobile and social trends have influenced client engagement models, driving customers to expect new and better application services delivered faster. Cloud technology is helping businesses respond to these drivers by changing the status quo, enabling business leaders to fast-track innovation and advance key priorities.
To achieve these results, organizations need to rapidly exploit cloud capabilities across a hybrid environment that includes both on-premises and off-premises options.
The simple path to a hybrid cloud environment
Business leaders are choosing cloud for its economics, speed and flexibility. Both off-premises and on-premises cloud options are available to businesses today:
- Off-premises cloud offers rapid access and low cost of entry
- On-premises cloud offers a higher level of security, control and customizability for enterprise use
To truly realize the benefits of cloud and leverage your existing investments in enterprise applications, you need a simpler approach. You cannot afford the time and resources to manually perform all the configuration and integration tasks required to deploy and manage an application, its environment and the underlying infrastructure. Complexity must be removed from the process. You also need a way to easily take advantage of both off-premises and on-premises cloud environments. The answer is a hybrid cloud where both environments are interconnected and you can deploy and move applications seamlessly between them.
Using the cloud dynamically and strategically
Taking full advantage of dynamic hybrid cloud options—using on-premises and off-premises clouds strategically—opens the door to greater opportunities for innovation and optimization:
- Extend enterprise apps (for example, with mobile): You can rapidly deploy new applications such as mobile apps in an off-premises cloud environment and integrate them with enterprise apps in your on-premises corporate cloud. Over time, as the mobile app gains acceptance and becomes more integrated into the business, you can easily move it into the corporate cloud environment.
- Test and learn with rapid experimentation: An off-premises cloud can be an opportunity for the business to test and learn. You can try ideas quickly, deliver something in a week or two, get feedback and then repeat. Behind this rapid experimentation and innovation, you have flexible operational alternatives in either an on-premises or off-premises environment based on the needs of the business.
- Drive optimization: You might choose to leverage the off-premises environment for development and testing to handle the rapid, dynamic setup of test environments for enterprise apps, and then use the corporate cloud environment when rolling enhancements into production. You also may have some lesser-used instances of key enterprise applications or tier 2 apps that might make sense to offload from your on-premises environment—freeing up resources and lowering the expense of maintaining application environments.
- Ease market expansion and globalization: You may be looking at entering new global markets and want to quickly utilize enterprise applications without capital investment for a physical data center presence or the latency of a remote data center. You can easily use an off-premises cloud to make this happen.
Schedule a consultation today to learn how Flagship can help you design and implement an hybrid cloud solution that is simple and efficient for your specific needs.
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