Cloud adoption is on the rise, just take a look at any one of the analyst reports over the past few years. The cloud is growing but there’s still that nagging question of whether businesses can trust it.
Whether it’s trusting security credentials of the cloud provider, where data is residing, or just trusting that the service will stay up, there are a lot of boxes that need to be ticked for a company to sign off on the technology becoming a critical part of its operations.
The problem is that cloud outages keep on happening and this acts as a reminder to users that the cloud does not offer 100% uptime.
Recent outages, like that for Amazon Web Services and its S3 product and the Google Drive app for Windows crash, remind business decision makers and IT staff that the cloud is not necessarily the Holy Grail.
However, while there are outages these tend to be few and far between and on the whole a cloud system will provide more uptime and general availability than a traditional legacy system that requires regular downtime for maintenance.
Perhaps rather than being an argument against the use of cloud, an outage of a public cloud service provides a strong argument for the use of hybrid cloud.
Read more: Microsoft eases CIOs data locality concerns for big data projects
It’s become increasingly clear that businesses still want to have an on-premises solution, with some public cloud use to augment their environment. This is why a growing number of cloud vendors are pushing hybrid cloud.
Content from our partners
Microsoft for example is drawing closer to being able to fully support all cloud environments with the Azure Stack, which is expected to become generally available in mid-2017.
The Azure Stack, currently in Technical Preview 3, will be able to host pretty much all the functions you could desire, with the flexibility of public, private and hybrid deployments.
According to Microsoft, around 74% of companies believe that using hybrid cloud will grow their business and 82% are already using a hybrid cloud strategy.
Although trust remains an issue, hybrid cloud should go some way to remedying any lingering concerns. The security and peace of mind of a private deployment combined with the flexibility and scale of the public cloud provides all the base ingredients needed to enable business growth.
On the matter of which vendor you can trust, well that’s always going to be a difficult one. Each of the top vendors has its strengths but it’s about choosing the right tools for the job and solving the business problem.
