How the Hybrid Cloud is Working for Businesses

One top IT infrastructure priority is ensuring that their applications are always in an optimal state, which is often expressed as a factor of speed. Being fast is especially important since on-site consumer transactions can fall by 20percent because of a slow or bad application experience. On mobile devices, more than half of its users would abandon a web app if they take more than three seconds to load. If you just glance across your office and see the time spent by employees waiting for workplace apps to load, you can see in real time how this results in lost productivity which can just accumulate over the months and years.

At a macro level, these expectations are about reducing friction between the user and their applications. An ideal application experience for an application owner is one that feels invisible: its easy to access, easy to manage, always optimized and properly provisioned for.

Intelligence we’ve gathered from over 60,000 global application deployments indicate that as much as 48percent of organizations see as many as nine incidents per week resulting in application outages. If we want to create the ideal application experience in the multi-cloud, we will need to create an application delivery service that:

• Speeds up the deployment process

• Is easy to manage and root cause

• Provides flexibility in operational cost and provisioning of IT needs

• Has a resilient business continuity

Avoiding Vendor lock-in

A new phrase is popping up that is clouding the migration discussion – “repatriation” – a term that means returning an application that was once cloud-based and returning it to a non-cloud base – e.g. a data center, color, or on-premises environment. Many are finding that scaling costs can be difficult to wind back or that as an application’s usage wanes, it becomes more cost effective and having a lot of dedicated, scalable infrastructure just isn’t warranted.

By using a pay-as-you-go metered license model, it helps to control operational cost since the firm only pays for the load consumed, instead of over- or under-provisioning resources. Such IT spending would match your business rhythm based on its online traffic, and it frees up the cashflow for other business needs.

Another challenge for most IT administrators is their vendor’s preference for locking users into their own environments. For example, ZK Research found from a survey conducted with the CIO’s and IT Directors with 1,000 enterprise survey respondents, a staggering 70percent wanted to replace their current load-balancer vendor, citing vendor lock-in, pricing, and unnecessary complexity as key reasons. Fortunately, we are seeing more load-balancers supporting cross-platform and cross-brand compatibility. However, if we genuinely want to help more businesses successfully incorporate multi-cloud solutions for businesses, we need to put the application experience at the forefront, and to ensure that the incoming hybrid cloud rollout is well-met in Asia.