Unifying Hybrid Cloud Resilience

As the years go by, companies are increasingly choosing to spread their data storage across cloud and on-premises environments to gain greater data control and flexibility. This hybrid-cloud approach is a good way to balance the security and control that comes with on-premises storage with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness that comes with storing data in the cloud. Unfortunately, cloud-based data is just as susceptible to cyberattacks, and cybercriminals are just as up to date with data storage trends as you are.  

Understanding the Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud infrastructure always consists of a private environment and a public cloud. This dynamic can vary depending on the providers you use and the demands of each workload you want to protect. Still, at the end of the day, whether you’re just starting out or already a well-established organization, optimizing your resources while keeping your security and performance where it needs to be is essential.

41% of companies consider cloud mobility to be the most important characteristic of a modern data protection solution. This is because of the key benefits a hybrid cloud infrastructure can bring, including increased flexibility, easier regulatory compliance, better cost-effectiveness, more effective support for remote staff, and enhanced innovation abilities, security, and risk management.

Hybrid Cloud Management Considerations

The benefits of adopting a hybrid-cloud approach in your own organization are numerous, but there are some challenges that come with managing the hybrid cloud as well. Whenever you go beyond purely on-premises architecture, management becomes more complex. Some important best practices to follow when shifting to the hybrid cloud include monitoring resource usage and workloads carefully, setting billing alerts to prevent surprise costs, and choosing a cloud provider that doesn’t lock you into one vendor and can keep up with your strategy as it evolves. This also means revisiting and amending your existing disaster recovery (DR) plans and backup strategies as needed, and reevaluating cloud providers you currently use to make sure they’re still the best fit for your business.

When searching for a cloud provider and developing your own hybrid cloud management strategy, it is important to have an idea of what tools are important to look out for when choosing what on-premises and cloud providers you want to work with. Some important things to look for could include:

• Container or instance orchestration and automation

• Performance and security monitoring and management

• Data backup and encryption

• Workload optimization

Ciox Health, for example, was looking for a solution that could provide maximum uptime and cyber resilience to effectively protect the more than 50 million medical records they interact with daily as a healthcare data technology company. They wanted to move their data to a vendor-agnostic solution that could support its multi-cloud that consisted of Azure, AWS, and a colocation data center. They ended up going with Veeam Data Platform to fulfill their requirements, since it was a solution that could support two different cloud vendors as well as an on-premises environment. Flexibility, openness, and interoperability were their main goals when looking for a data protection solution, and they found that in Veeam.

Hybrid Cloud Trends of 2024

When looking at broader hybrid cloud trends, specifically in 2024, 55% of workloads now operate within the data center, but 45% operate within clouds. This shows that, despite increased cloud usage, the data center is certainly still alive and well — new workloads may be spinning up to the cloud, but data center-centric workloads aren’t being decommissioned at nearly the same rate. Also, organizations shouldn’t be thinking about migrating to the cloud as a one-way path. Using several clouds in a blended platform isn’t the same thing as intermixing multiple vendors’ hardware in a single data center.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the trend toward the hybrid cloud isn’t just important information for you, but to cyber criminals as well. Research consistently reveals that cloud-based workloads are just as susceptible to cyberattacks as on-premises data centers, and therefore must be protected with the same rigor and methodologies as your on-premises workloads. With the rise of cloud-hosted data being affected in attacks, the need for cyber resiliency in your hybrid cloud backups has never been greater.  

Knowledge is Power

Whether you’re just now considering a move to the hybrid cloud or looking to evolve your existing hybrid cloud strategy, we want to point out some important resources to help you take a more informed approach. Part of this is to make sure you’re keeping up with the latest trends in this constantly changing industry. Earlier this week, we released our newest episode of Industry Insights, a livestream where we discussed these trends for 2024 and how they will affect the future of the hybrid and multi cloud, including some strategies to help you protect your cloud environments.  

Explore Industry-leading Data Protection

While we’re here, we just wanted to thank you all for supporting Veeam! If you want the opportunity to try Veeam for yourself, you can try our flagship solution, Veeam Data Platform, free for 30 days to see if it works for you! We also recently released our newest solution, Veeam Data Cloud Vault, a fully managed security storage resource on Microsoft Azure. If a lot of your data is in Azure, maybe give Veeam Vault a try! We also recently acquired Coveware, a leading provider in cyber extortion incident response. This acquisition brings best-in-class ransomware recovery and first responder capabilities together to further strengthen the radical resilience we bring to our customers every day.