The range of cloud technology offerings continues to grow – enhancements offer new solutions to old problems and better price points mean a more competitive market. Public and private cloud platforms are popular options and both have their advantages, but there are hybrid cloud benefits to consider, too.

As you explore the ways cloud can help your business, consider if a hybrid cloud solution may provide the best mix of resources and capabilities for your unique needs.

1 – More control over value

Though consumption pricing models and other cost efficiencies are hallmarks of many cloud solutions, a hybrid cloud gives you the flexibility to derive the very best value from your IT spend. When you need to scale up your public cloud capabilities, that extra money can go directly to the areas where it will have the greatest impact. If your private cloud resources require additional horsepower, you can very precisely target those expenses at the workloads and applications that will benefit from the increased capabilities. With the ability to finely tailor how your different cloud environments support your organization, a hybrid cloud solution offers ultimate control over expenditures and the value you derive from those investments.

2 – Dedicate your IT staff where they can be most effective

With many IT organizations running lean these days, it’s important to focus your internal expertise where it will drive the best results. A hybrid cloud solution enables you to identify those services your in-house team should prioritize, leaving others to be outsourced to your vendor. Do your core applications require specific security protocols? Your staff can deploy extra measures around those priority systems in your private cloud while your remaining workloads are protected by your public cloud provider. Do you need to scale up to support a new project but your internal team doesn’t have time to manage the increased capacity? With your public cloud solution vendor’s resources at the ready, you can continue to move your business ahead without stretching your IT department too thin.

3 – Ability to put workloads in the most suitable environment

Many applications and systems perform well when maintained in a public cloud, but some don’t. You may have niche needs that are highly sensitive to latency, for instance. To ensure a consistently good user experience, it often makes sense to retain these critical workloads in a private cloud environment. A hybrid cloud solution enables you to maintain applications and data in the environment that’s best suited to them. Systems that aren’t encumbered by latency or similar concerns can be migrated to the public cloud while more sensitive workloads can be kept in your private cloud. This blended strategy allows you to ensure that elements such as latency and bandwidth availability are fully are managed to your expectations, whether that means eliminating them as factors or absorbing them as part of the normal workflow.

4 – Maintain the usefulness of older applications

Many legacy systems continue to serve organizations well, but their age means that a good number of them were never designed for a public cloud environment. Migrating them can be tremendously cumbersome – even in instances where it’s possible to move them to a public cloud, the costs and impacts of any potential disruption to your operations are often prohibitive. Rather than feel forced into an upgrade, enterprises that deploy a hybrid cloud solution can benefit from the availability of public cloud resources for other applications while continuing to derive value from these older systems by maintaining them in an environment that preserves their existing state.

5 – Flexibility to support multiple business cases

As businesses expand their use of technology, it’s not uncommon to have multiple initiatives underway that each call for different resources. Some corporate data may adapt well to life in the public cloud, for example, while other data sets – those containing highly sensitive personal, financial, or intellectual property information – may be more challenging to migrate, either because of regulatory concerns or because their use is tied to more restrictive systems. With a hybrid cloud solution, your business doesn’t need to forsake one use case for another. Instead, you gain the benefit of both environments, giving you much greater flexibility in how you deploy technology as part of your greater goals.

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