The 3 Places Enterprises Go Wrong With Their Hybrid Cloud Strategy

The hybrid cloud market is on fire.

According to a recent study from MarketsandMarkets, the global hybrid cloud market—which will reach $44.6 billion this year—is on pace to reach $97.64 billion by 2023, growing at an impressive 17% clip each year.

There’s a reason hybrid cloud growth adoption is accelerating: the technology delivers a number of benefits, including agility, security, and cost-effectiveness. For these reasons, it increasingly looks like today’s leading organizations are choosing to migrate to hybrid cloud environments.

Unfortunately, you can’t simply decide the hybrid cloud is right for you and expect to seamlessly switch computing ecosystems without running into any problems. In fact, many organizations experience the same problems and struggles when they devise their hybrid cloud strategies and begin their migration.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at three of the most common places enterprise go wrong when moving to the hybrid cloud.

1. They get locked in with a vendor as they move to the cloud

When a company partners with the wrong cloud vendor, it can be very difficult and very expensive to switch to a new provider. Innovation can also grind to a halt, too, if the provider’s infrastructure doesn’t provide the tools and capabilities the company requires.

When companies fail to do their due diligence ahead of migrating to a hybrid cloud, they risk vendor lock-in—i.e., becoming dependent on a single cloud provider. The fear of vendor lock-in actually prevents many organizations from migrating to the cloud in the first place; 78% of decision makers say their companies are unable to maximize the benefit of the cloud because of this.

The good news is that avoiding vendor lock-in isn’t only possible—it can be quite easy with the right solution.

DataStax, for example, provides customers with the flexibility and control needed to move their data wherever they want, whenever they want, without having to worry about incurring downtime or being forced to make changes to their applications. The database—which can be used by administrators, developers, and security teams alike—is able to run across multiple clouds.

2. They don’t take a proactive approach to avoiding data silos

One of the promises of the cloud is that you’re able to migrate, build, and deploy applications with ease. However, when using multiple cloud environments, organizations often deal with inconsistent data models which prevent them from moving data from one cloud to the next.

In many cases, this leads to the creation of data silos. Data stored in each cloud environment remains isolated from other data repositories. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for organizations to unlock the full value of their data. It also makes data governance harder and creates data sovereignty challenges.

Thanks to DataStax’s masterless architecture, customers are able to retain full control of all of their data—which makes it easier to avoid the creation of data silos. DataStax’s distributed database solution supports multi-cloud replication, which enables you to build and deploy applications leveraging all your data across multiple cloud environments.

3. They are unable to develop mission-critical applications rapidly

Organizations are increasingly moving to the cloud because it enables them to build transformative applications in a time-efficient manner. By leveraging the scalability and high availability delivered by the cloud, organizations can build real-time applications that increase productivity, accelerate innovation, and drive competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, companies that don’t do their due diligence ahead of cloud migration often run into data silos which prevent them from developing these applications in a rapid fashion. This prevents them from taking full advantage of the investments they’ve made in the cloud.

Hybrid cloud is quickly becoming the reality for most enterprises, but there are many ways to play the hybrid cloud environment, and many ways it can go wrong. With a solid hybrid cloud strategy, enterprises can avoid data silos, cloud vendor lock-in, and sluggish application deployment, and in doing so, be way ahead of the curve in this new hybrid and multi-cloud world.