If you work within some fields, and you start to talk shop with someone else who knows about the concepts you’re bringing up, they might understand exactly what you mean. However, if you bring up these same concepts with an individual who’s not in that field, their eyes will glaze over. It’s like when you start talking about your hobby with someone who has no interest in it.
For instance, maybe you work in IT, and you start talking about hybrid cloud adoption. While hybrid cloud adoption has many practical uses, someone who’s not in that world presumably won’t know what it means.
That doesn’t much matter in most instances. You can always change the subject to talk about something in which you both have an interest. However, what if you’re the head of the IT department, and you’re talking to the company owner or CEO?
Maybe you’re trying to convince them that they should open the company’s purse strings so you can do hybrid cloud adoption. You feel strongly that it’s a good idea for the company, but you can’t seem to convince the owner or CEO of why it’s important.
In this situation, you’ll need to set aside the complex, IT-related terminology and try to explain this concept in the simplest terms possible. Let’s talk about how you can do that. We will also cover why hybrid cloud adoption matters, which you might also have to bring up with whoever controls the company’s budgetary decisions.
What Does “The Cloud” Mean?
First, let’s talk about how you can define the cloud. Convincing a company owner or CEO that they should do hybrid cloud adoption will probably start there if they don’t know this term yet.
The cloud means a system or network of remote servers. Maybe they’re virtual, or perhaps they’re physical. They exist to manage and store data, services, and applications.
You can access all of these anywhere that you have internet access if you have the cloud. This allows you to use a wide variety of resources without needing direct access to any physical hardware.
If you understand the basics of how computer and internet technology work, you should understand why it’s helpful for some companies to have cloud access. Not every company will need it, but many modern business entities do.
What About “The Hybrid Cloud?”
As for the term “hybrid cloud,” that means a combination of a public and private cloud. In other words, if a company has a hybrid cloud setup, they will have some on-premises infrastructure, which they would call a private cloud, but they would have some public cloud services as well.
If you have this kind of a setup as a company or individual, it means that you can move your data and applications seamlessly and with minimal effort between these environments. You will then have greater scalability and flexibility. You can more easily manage your workload for specific needs, which many companies will appreciate in the modern era.
What Does Hybrid Cloud Adoption Mean?
If you have explained all of this to your company’s owner or CEO, and they seem with you so far, then you can next tell them about hybrid cloud adoption. This term means that you’re going from a strictly private or public cloud over to a hybrid one.
If your company’s decision-makers decide that they want to go with a hybrid cloud, then they will presumably integrate both third-party cloud services (public cloud) and an on-premises infrastructure (private cloud). This will create the kind of cost-effective, scalable, and flexible environment that you presumably want.
This process might seem more or less complex in various circumstances. If you have a smaller company with very few IT resources, then going from a strictly public or private cloud to a hybrid model might take a single afternoon or even a couple of hours.
However, if you have a huge company with hundreds or even thousands of unique and crucial IT resources, then this switchover process might take a lot longer. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not worth it, though.
Why Might Your Company Want to Do It?
Maybe you’ve gotten to this point in the conversation, and your CEO or company owner still understands what you’re saying. If so, then you’re doing great. Now comes the tricky part, though. You need to do a little bit of hard selling to convince them to go over to the hybrid cloud model.
That might seem difficult, but you have a secret weapon. What company owner or CEO doesn’t want to save money? That’s one aspect of going from a public or private cloud model to a hybrid one that you can really take some time to emphasize.
If you go a hybrid cloud model, then you can probably optimize your company’s resource allocation. By doing so, you can also reduce the overall operational costs of your company’s infrastructure.
You can usually do so by implementing pay-as-you-go pricing. Cost optimization and flexible scaling naturally become a part of that.
In other words, if your company goes to a hybrid cloud model from a strictly public or private one, then the business can pay for only what it uses. There’s less waste. You won’t have to spend money on over-provisioning.
If you have a model that implements the best of both worlds, the public and private cloud models, then you can reduce your infrastructure costs. You will probably reduce the need for so much physical infrastructure, storage, and maintenance. This leads to lower capital expenditure, sometimes called cap-ex in the business world.
You can talk about many additional perks that potentially come with the hybrid cloud model, but most company owners or CEOs will want you to talk in terms of dollars. If you get to this point, and you have the individual in charge of the company nodding along, then maybe you’ve sold them on making this change.
