Even before covid-19, hybrid cloud had gained traction. Now with the pandemic, hybrid cloud has attracted even more attention and is seen to benefit end users in various ways.
A hybrid cloud solution combines the best of pure cloud and on-premises architectures. Even before covid-19,
hybrid cloud had gained traction among users. Now with the pandemic, hybrid cloud has attracted even more attention and is seen to benefit end users in various ways.
Hybrid cloud is an architecture combining elements of on-premises and pure cloud solutions. In terms of video surveillance,
some of the footage can be stored onsite, while others are go to the cloud. This has various advantages for the end user, among them flexibility, bandwidth optimization and the ability to transition from a capex model (buy equipment upfront) to an opex model (pay a subscription fee on a per-need basis).
These benefits have pushed demands for hybrid cloud solutions. According to MarketsandMarkets, the hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from US$44.6 billion in 2018 to $97.6 billion by 2023, a CAGR of 17 percent.
Shift to hybrid accelerated by covid
Even before covid-19, which became a large-scale pandemic in the beginning of this year, hybrid cloud had already gotten the attention of end users. Now, covid-19 will only make hybrid cloud’s advantages more noticeable to users. “The move to cloud and hybrid architectures was well underway before the pandemic. The arrival of covid-19 and the unprecedented impacts it has had on businesses of all kinds has only accelerated this shift,” said Laurent Villeneuve, Product Marketing Manager at
Genetec.
In general, hybrid cloud can help end users in certain ways during the pandemic. These are listed as follows.
Facilitate remote-working
Needless to say,
remote-working has become the mantra for end user organizations during the pandemic, and this way of working has become the “new normal” that’s expected to last for quite some time, even after covid. In this sense, hybrid cloud facilitates remote-working by offering agility and flexibility.
“From a covid-19 perspective, hybrid video cloud systems enable remote management and maintenance of systems, thereby limiting in-person service calls. The response required in order to deal with covid also created some concern for business owners about the potential for increased crime due to economic hardships. And many business owners found the desire to easily view their properties remotely, and with a consistent interface if they have multiple properties,” said Tom Buckley, Co-Founder of
Qumulex.
“The rise of the mobile workforce as a new standard makes a lot sense. Supported by cloud and hybrid architectures, the deployment of new services is considerably easier and there’s much less physical or virtual configuration required. You don’t have to set up server rooms, and for mission-critical systems you gain built-in fault tolerance for outages that would have been showstoppers for pure cloud, or pure on-prem,” said Villeneuve. “From a purely technology standpoint, this would be considered one of the few silver linings of the current crisis, making organizations more agile, more resilient, and more adaptable to change of any kind.”
Reduced cost
Hybrid cloud also enables cost reduction, which is important for companies who now have less budget to work from during the pandemic. “Reducing costs is one of the biggest benefits of the hybrid cloud. This cloud deployment option is highly cost-effective because of its ability to quickly use and scale data and applications as and when needed. This way you need to only pay for the additional resources when you need them,” said a post by ColoHouse.
Security
Finally, hybrid cloud is seen as secure, a feature that’s badly needed by remote workers. “Where proper cybersecurity hygiene and system hardening have been achieved and properly maintained, a hybrid architecture can be as cyber secure as one that is deployed on premises or managed in the cloud. Just as a cloud-hosted service would provide fully managed, always up to date security, a hybrid infrastructure will follow the same ‘defense in depth’ standards and processes to ensure cybersecurity,” Villeneuve said.