In 2012, Wolters Kluwer migrated from Perot’s private data centers to Dell’s and Atos’s cloud based infrastructure. The reason was to create and deliver a safe and secure standard infrastructure for cloud based services to customers worldwide. Services that could be adapted based on regional and business unit specific needs.
Three years later, MarketsandMarkets, the “World’s No. 2 firm in terms of annually published premium market research reports, predicts that the hybrid cloud ‘will achieve a compound annual growth rate of 27% between now and 2019,’” thereby far out stripping the growth of the IT market.
What would a full blown move to the cloud mean?
A server based infrastructure means a host of data centers, high maintenance and storage costs, as well as increased security risk.
Source: Hybrid Cloud Explained
A move to the cloud typically means a shared data center, automatic upgrades, pay only for what you use, fully automated processes instead of manual labor, less maintenance, and a lower security risk.
Source: Hybrid Cloud Explained
This also means that you have to do away with any existing server infrastructure, change your maintenance processes and cost infrastructure. Moreover less maintenance also means less manual labor, so less people. Lots of time, effort and resources are required for such a transition. So the profit gained by less costs for the cloud solution will dissolve soon enough.
However, sticking with the same old server infrastructure is not useful either if the goal is to advance in these times of continuously changing markets.
In my opinion, the hybrid cloud is a very good option. Why?
Not because of the fact that a marketing agency predicts the hybrid cloud will exponentially grow in the next years (although these kind of stats do help).
But because Wolters Kluwer will have the best of both worlds. The hybrid cloud “keeps the most in-demand data closest to the user, improving performance and adding encryption. It’s faster than a public cloud, but cheaper than storing so much data locally” according to Aaron Black, director of informatics at ITMI.
We have noticed already that customers want “speed of search”: getting the right answer to a question as quickly as possible irrespective of which device they use.
Source: Hybrid Cloud Explained
This is where the hybrid cloud comes in: it is cheaper and safer than a full blown move to the cloud. It is faster too, which will allow Wolters Kluwer to offer ‘ speed of search’ type of solutions to customers. Moreover, without having to get rid of the entire server infrastructure and maintenance teams, we can expand and grow as we go along.