Today, more than 93 percent of mid-size businesses have or plan to have a multi-platform strategy to serve the strategic business needs and tactical requirements of their enterprise systems and digital infrastructure initiatives. *

As the enterprise becomes more distributed and the remote work paradigm unfolds, there is an accelerating need to migrate workloads out of the corporate, on-premise data center and into more flexible, resilient, scalable and secure cloud and modern data center solutions.

While “cloud-first” has been a growing trend, many IT and digital leaders are now leading with a “right time, right place” strategy, which carries a higher probability to successfully deliver  expected business outcomes and velocity of innovation. This “right time, right place” thinking is fueling the demand for hybrid infrastructure platforms.

According to Gartner:

“Workload placement is not only about moving to the cloud, it is about creating a baseline for infrastructure strategy based on workloads rather than physical data centers. This is causing I&O leaders to rethink infrastructure strategies, which have a direct impact on enterprise data centers.”

Recent research from INAP confirms this. A majority of IT pros said in our recent State of IT Infrastructure Management survey that the global pandemic has made their organizations more likely to move workloads away from on-site, physical data centers. The top destinations included not just hyperscale cloud, but also colocation and hosted private cloud solutions, indicating more than ever that hybrid is here and here to stay.

The Case for Hybrid Infrastructure

There are many reasons to choose a hybrid solution; let’s dive into a few of the best use cases:

When Lift and Shift is the Least Effective Option

Most enterprise applications sitting in the corporate data center are not “cloud-ready” and were not built to perform properly in distributed public clouds. This makes moving them difficult or impossible without extensive re-architecture. Across the board, environments that are not fully optimized for applications is the number one factor holding back infrastructure strategies, according to IT pros surveyed by INAP. With the right hybrid strategy, however, application-infrastructure mismatches will be a thing of the past.

When Security and Compliance Demand an Alternate Path

Many industries operate in complex regulatory environments as a result of data governance, privacy and security. Again, these workloads may not be suitable for public cloud or other multi-tenant solutions. The increased focus on data sovereignty in certain countries makes moving all applications and data sources to a single cloud risky and complex. The impact of data gravity and the need to process and store data as close to the source or destination as possible increases the need for a distributed architecture and location independence.

When Your Workloads Require Sophisticated Multiplatform Architectures

In the near future, business needs will drive workload placement and integration across multiple platforms will be necessary to maintain a competitive advantage and control costs.  As a result, hybrid deployments will be the norm for the foreseeable future. Applications must remain part of a highly connected, secure and integrated enterprise ecosystem to effectively serve the needs of the business.

When Operational Flexibility is Paramount

As the requirements of the business change, so must the infrastructure that supports them. This is why many enterprise and digital innovators are choosing hybrid to maximize their chances of success as a smarter approach to infrastructure outsourcing. The fact is, where applications and data live today may not be the best destination for them to live tomorrow. As the application itself or the digital maturity of a company changes, IT and digital leaders need the flexibility to gracefully move applications to the right place, at the right time and at the right cost to get the full value of the cloud.  

INAP ‘The Hybrid Infrastructure Company’

INAP is a global provider of secure, performance-oriented hybrid infrastructure solutions. We bring together an interconnected ecosystem of enterprise cloud, data center and managed services on a single technology platform. Today, our company is a combination of several respected and successful cloud and data center companies strategically brought together to create a hybrid-platform serving the mid-market enterprise and the digital innovators of tomorrow.

At INAP, we believe that flexibility is the key to creating a competitive infrastructure advantage and that the foundation of success for the mid-market enterprise and digital innovators will be built on infrastructure when and where you need it, not a single destination.

Enterprise IT and digital leaders need a single technology platform and partner that enables them to move workloads and innovate at the right time and right place without the barriers of lock-in to a single strategy.

And we provide it at INAP.

We were the first company in the industry to develop a solution spend portability program allowing clients to move infrastructure solutions, dollar-for-dollar, part way through their contracts. The program remains central to our identity and is one of several reasons why we are  “The Hybrid Infrastructure Company” that helps simplify your infrastructure transformation journey.

INAP for Enterprise IT

Regardless of where you are today in your cloud journey – on-premise, hybrid, physical, virtual or public, INAP can help you navigate and transform by leveraging a combination of our strategically located data centers, enterprise cloud, dedicated bare metal, disaster recovery, security, public cloud and managed services solutions.

Our expert solution teams leverage a comprehensive, consultative approach through our Infrastructure by Business Objective (IBO) framework that ensures alignment of your mission-critical applications to available services, location, platform and deployment strategy to maximize your business outcome and return on investment.

INAP for the Digital Innovator

Whether you are in E-commerce, Gaming, Advertising Technology, Big Data or you are building the applications to power your digital tomorrow, INAP brings a rich history of delivering the lowest-latency networking and diverse global peering coupled with performance-oriented bare metal solutions that maximize response time, scale and flexibility to enhance the end-consumer experience. As innovators ourselves, we are hyper-focused on delivering the industry’s strongest SLAs, unparalleled visibility and high-performance across our single-tenant, multi-tenant and modern data center solutions to build your digital infrastructure.

Ready to chart your hybrid course? We’re ready to partner with you.

* Flexera State of the Cloud 2020

https://blog.cloudera.com/why-adopt-a-hybrid-multi-cloud-strategy/