Blog (Insight Voices) HCaaS: A Consumption-Based Approach to Hybrid Cloud
By Kent Christensen / 7 Mar 2024 / Topics: Data center
For companies seeking to manage workloads both on-premises and in the cloud, hybrid cloud offers a combined solution with the convenience of cloud and the control of on-premises. As organizations turn to a hybrid cloud approach, many are unaware of the benefits of modernizing their on-premises environment to match the agility found in the public cloud.
In this article, learn how leaders can activate flexibility and agility across on-premises and cloud environments with Insight-delivered Hybrid Cloud as a Service (HCaaS). With HCaaS, you’ll get seamless and flexible hybrid cloud infrastructure, integrating security and scalability across workload locations — all on a predictable pay-as-you-go model.
Why leaders are turning to hybrid cloud
A cloud-only approach doesn’t always make sense for every organization. Many leaders understand that keeping some workloads on-premises is essential to the success of their infrastructure and business model. Leaders can leverage on-premises solutions to mitigate costs, manage intellectual property, and ensure security and compliance across the environment.
Likewise, many also understand the benefits of keeping some workloads cloud-native: seamless scalability, low overhead cost and unparalleled flexibility. However, a successful infrastructure strategy addresses both business needs (agility and scalability) and the secure management of critical workloads in on-premises environments. For this reason, many organizations are choosing a hybrid cloud approach.
A hybrid cloud environment bridges the gap between on-premises and cloud environments, helping you keep some workloads on-premises while running part of your operations in the cloud. This approach integrates private and public clouds with data-stored environments, offering more flexibility, increased agility in storage and greater scalability of data.
This integration lets leaders get the best of both worlds: the scalability and convenience of cloud, while keeping the control and performance of on-premises — without inheriting the risks of either.
Limitations of hybrid cloud
We know that cloud environments offer a modern platform with lower operational costs and agile benefits.
But many leaders are now asking: How can we bring these cloudlike benefits to the on-premises side of our hybrid cloud model?
Leaders may want cloudlike flexibility out of their on-premises workload environments for a few reasons:
Rising costs
- Leaders are no longer willing to purchase bulk capacity upfront. Organizations are growing tired of large multimillion-dollar capital purchases and deprecating those over three to five years.
- Cloudlike pricing models, however, are pay as you go, which greatly reduces operational costs.
Need for agility & faster adaption
- The rate of innovation in the market, along with customer innovation, has been unprecedented. New applications are coming online at a pace never seen before, and data is being generated at a speed that we’ve never experienced.
- In response, leaders are having a tough time predicting the constant changes, and it becomes even tougher to plan what’s needed long term. This presents the need for a more agile, cloudlike consumption model. Cloudlike environments enable companies to scale up and down as needed, helping leaders better adapt to the ever-fluctuating environment.
Leveraging cloudlike on-premises infrastructure
- In a public cloud environment, customers are not burdened with maintaining the infrastructure as they would in the traditional CapEx world. Patches, updates, even upgrades occur behind the scenes, without the application even aware of the changes.
- Hybrid cloud in an as-a-service format decouples the lifecycle management of hardware from the consumption of a service to run your applications.
Shifting the way your business consumes on-premises infrastructure can mean minimizing costs while maximizing performance.
Organizations need agility and scalability on all sides to remain competitive, not just in the cloud. Modernizing your on-premises consumption model means your on-premises workloads can actually work alongside cloud resources and benefit from all the advantages of cloud.
Leverage hybrid cloud with an as-a-service approach.
An as-a-service consumption model helps extend data centers into the cloud with more control and visibility.
HCaaS is a component of an overall cloud strategy where workloads can live in the right place at the right time. By complementing public cloud initiatives with a hosted/on-premises cloud option (when it makes sense), leaders can leverage the power of hybrid (and thus, have more choice). With HCaaS, leaders can use on-premises consumption with complete hybrid cloud solutions. HCaaS provides organizations with a seamless and integrated approach to managing on-premises infrastructure and cloud resources.
Advantages of HCaaS at a glance
- Faster time to market
- Streamlined operational efficiency
- Improved ability to innovate in your industry
HCaaS empowers companies to modernize their on-premises infrastructure in a consumption-based model, replacing enormous, long-term capacity purchases with a predictable pay-as-you-go system that’s already being applied to existing workloads in the cloud.
HCaaS enables organizations to become more agile, scaling up and down as necessary and as business needs evolve. Plus, like other as-a-service models, HCaaS helps you gain access to information across your hybrid environment, on demand.
Why Insight for Hybrid Cloud as a Service
Hybrid cloud leverages the best of on-premises and cloud environments, and HCaaS integrates the benefits of both into a simple and practical consumption-based model.
Insight-delivered HCaaS offers a hands-off approach to hybrid cloud consumption. Our Insight team comes equipped with a deep understanding of business, technology and workloads — and the best ways your company can leverage HCaaS to exceed business outcomes.
Ready to activate your hybrid cloud environment? Learn how Insight-delivered HCaaS can help you get the most out of your infrastructure today.
Kent Christensen
Practice Director
Kent leans on more than 20 years of industry experience to help clients with storage consolidation, virtualization, and cloud strategies that drive outcomes. Previously holding IT management and software engineering positions, Kent also researches, recommends, and integrates technologies and services into Insight's expanding portfolio of offerings.
