Organizations must adopt a modular hybrid infrastructure to remain relevant as technology and market needs change. Here’s how to build a resilient strategy.
Hybrid IT unlocks great flexibility by keeping data and applications where they optimize security, compliance, cost, and other aspects of your operations. This makes it an indispensable strategy for scalability, innovation, and business continuity in the digital age.
Gartner predicts that 65% of application workloads will be deployable in the cloud by 2027. About 90% of companies will leverage a hybrid IT strategy to meet objectives and market demands. These and similar projections underpin the need to accelerate hybrid IT adoption in 2025 to stay ahead of the digital curve.
But what are the critical considerations for building a hybrid IT strategy? How can you ensure your digital transformation efforts yield a resilient and secure solution? Read on to learn more.
Analyzing Current Infrastructure and Identifying Improvement Areas
When crafting a hybrid IT strategy, asking critical questions about the current state of your infrastructure provides the foundation for understanding capabilities and areas for improvement. Three primary considerations include:
What is the Place of Legacy Systems in Your Strategy?
If you’re still using legacy systems for some business functions, you must assess whether they are compatible with your cloud and integration needs. From there, determine how to bridge them with new technologies. In most cases, upgrading or replacing legacy systems will be necessary for a smooth transformation.
What Infrastructure Gaps Exist?
It’s crucial to investigate whether there are any data silos to ensure they don’t create blind spots that negatively impact workflows in the new environment. The current hardware state, including storage systems, networking devices, and servers, must also be audited to determine what has outlived its practical life. Consider overhauling devices likely to break down and those with the most security vulnerabilities.
Are you ready for the cloud?
Finally, assess your network infrastructure’s capabilities and bandwidth to ensure it can support the increased data flows associated with cloud operations. At the same time, consider the short and long-term financial implications of moving to the cloud to avoid surprises that could derail your digital transformation.
Ensuring Resilience, Flexibility, and Efficiency
The next step phase of your hybrid IT strategy is determining how to maintain resilience, flexibility, and efficiency.
Continuity of your hybrid infrastructure is best achieved through a multi-layered redundancy strategy. Some of the measures you can take include:
- Implementing multi-site disaster recovery solutions with geographically distributed data centers
- Utilizing failover systems to redirect traffic during system failures automatically
- Developing containerized and microservices architectures that enable rapid system recovery and minimal downtime
- Leveraging advanced monitoring and analytics tools to identify and mitigate potential infrastructure vulnerabilities before they turn chaotic.
For the most flexibility, instead of provisioning your everything for peak seasons or sudden spikes in traffic, consider maintaining only those resources you typically use on-premise and leverage cloud features such as load balancing, autoscaling, and on-demand alternatives to ramp up capacity when needed.
Additionally, deploy monitoring and reporting mechanisms to track cloud usage patterns and identify underutilized resources so you can decommission them. This will be critical to preventing IT sprawl and minimizing your overall spending.
Steps to Develop a Sustainable Hybrid IT Model
Here are three steps you can take to ensure your infrastructure serves you in the long run:
1. Combine Cloud With On-Premise Effectively
Carefully consider where data and applications should move and why. This is key to optimizing operations and maximizing the investment’s value.
Keep in mind that data and applications that thrive in one environment may not necessarily be suitable for the other. For example, while the cloud is ideal for hosting web applications, collaboration tools, and development and testing environments, your most sensitive data is safer on-premise. On-premise is also the better choice for reducing latency and maximizing performance across applications with high computing needs.
Read our comprehensive breakdown of where to keep data and applications for insights on optimizing your integration strategy.
2. Secure Data Flow Between Systems
To secure data flow between systems, ensure Zero-Trust is baked into your hybrid architecture. All systems should “never trust, but always verify” access requests. Implementing high-level encryption for all sensitive information, whether at rest or in transit, can also help minimize risks in case bad actors manage to intercept data.
Part of your hybrid IT strategy should be conducting regular audits of the effectiveness of security controls as threats evolve. This will ensure that no vulnerability ever slips through the cracks.
3. Ensure Regulatory Compliance Across the Board
Depending on your industry, you may be required to uphold specific data protection standards in your on-premise and cloud environments. It is crucial to understand these and develop a comprehensive governance framework with clear policies and guidelines regarding how you will handle data, ensure its security, and meet all compliance requirements.
By keeping these considerations top of mind and following up with the appropriate steps, you can usher in an era of resilience for your business.
CoreBTS’s Expertise in Guiding IT Transformation
Building an effective hybrid IT strategy can be daunting, but you don’t have to go it alone. Consider leveraging the Core BTS advantage. Drawing from a 20+ year history rooted in infrastructure and cloud technology, Core BTS helps leading organizations design, implement, and optimize modular solutions tailored to business needs. Be confident you’re in safe hands. We’ll help you create a secure, resilient, always up-and-running infrastructure.
Partner with CoreBTS for a future-ready IT strategy. Get a custom consultation now to learn more.
