Hybrid cloud solutions require a flexible approach

It's no question that public sector agencies and private companies alike are turning to the cloud in greater numbers. According to Federal Times, most of the larger government agencies have already adopted a mix of private and public commercial clouds - smaller agencies may follow suit as Washington D.C. continues to push for data center consolidation. In the private sector, over 70 percent of companies are looking to integrate a hybrid cloud solution in 2014, according to a Gartner study, with even more companies expected to pursue the technology this year. However, the hybrid cloud is not so simple as plug-and-play. IT teams and decision makers must be in sync to develop a hybrid set-up that meets their business needs and helps to cut costs.

Each data center's hybrid needs are unique
Data Center Knowledge stressed that IT teams will have to think long and hard about the needs of their company's data center before they invest in a hybrid strategy. Reflecting on issues like the company's security needs, required recovery time and the cloud expertise of the staff already on your payroll will provide important insight into the exact type of cloud solution that can make your business leaner and more flexible.

You should also spend time identifying which piece of your company's information are too important to trust to a public cloud vendor. Doing this work early will help you establish a realistic budget of your full storage needs and determine how much you'll be spending on private storage. In some cases, such as government agencies dealing with secure information, privacy concerns may be so great that IT teams must operate a small in-house storage solution in lieu of or in addition to a mixture of private and public cloud storage.

IT teams will have to develop solutions as they go
In a world with increasingly complex hybrid strategies, it's best to start simple. Integrating the new storage method in stages will be less work, and is less inherently risky, than trying to update the entire data center at once. IT teams may find that their current mix of private and public cloud is not meeting their needs, and need to adjust their ratio. Thankfully, cloud storage makes it easy and cost effective for companies to scale their storage as necessary. In cases where the need for physical security is so great that in-house storage is absolutely necessary, using a remote console server will simplify the challenge of making that data accessible in other locations.

Perle's wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers and network administrators with secure remote management of any device with a serial console port. Plus, they are the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market with the advanced security functionality needed to easily perform secure remote data center management and out-of-band management of IT assets from anywhere in the world.