THE EVOLUTION OF HYBRID CLOUD

Cloud spending is increasing, with businesses recognising the advantages that come with hybrid cloud as Gareth Tucker, Principal Hybrid Specialist at AWS explains

WRITTEN BY: MAYA DERRICK

Businesses are moving to the cloud faster than ever before with spending on cloud computing accounting for 33% of IT spend in 2020 and growing to 45% by 2024, according to Gartner. For many, adopting a cloud model is compelling compared to owning and operating on-premises data centres.

With advantages including lower costs, increased agility, and faster innovation, the cloud accelerates digital transformation as it provides access to hundreds of tools and capabilities only possible with the breadth of services and scale of the cloud.

To support this shift, AWS’ Gareth Tucker explains, businesses need to be able to seamlessly operate a broad range of applications — from Software-as-aService web applications to applications that process real-time medical imaging.

“Most of these applications can be easily migrated to the cloud, but some need to be re-architected or ‘modernised’ before they can be moved, and a few will remain on premises or in a specific location due to low latency, local data processing, or data residency requirements,” he says.

“Regardless of where their applications may need to reside, businesses today want to bring the cloud closer to wherever they need it to build and run their applications.”

The evolution of hybrid cloud

The definition of hybrid infrastructure itself is evolving rapidly, now encompassing a combination of cloud services, edge nodes, and on-premises data centres. At AWS, hybrid infrastructure is considered to include the cloud along with other edge nodes, on-premises data centres being one of them.