Your C-Suite's Not Sold on Hybrid Cloud IT? Here’s How to Change That

As an experienced IT professional, you understand the benefits of migrating your company’s IT operations to the cloud. You also know that convincing your C-Suite of that is not an easy task. In their eyes, moving to the cloud means an expensive IT overhaul, workforce interruptions, and a laundry list of other hassles. And their concerns are fair—up until recently, a software migration would be a tumultuous and disruptive project.

Today, things are different. In order to mitigate these concerns, businesses can start implementing a hybrid cloud approach that connects them to cloud-based tools while still making use of the critical on-premise systems that sit at the core of their organizations.

What does a hybrid cloud IT model look like?

Before you present your management team with the benefits of a hybrid cloud model, it’s important to define it in easily digestible terms. After all, business executives aren’t likely to implement something they don’t understand.

As its name implies, a hybrid cloud IT model brings together two or more standard infrastructure models, which include the following:

Public cloud: A cloud that is delivered over the internet and available for purchase by any customer. Offerings on the public cloud include software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and storage as a service, among others.

Private cloud: Also referred to as an internal or enterprise cloud, a private cloud is built for a single customer, and used exclusively by that organization, as well as their clients and partners. This makes it more customizable, but also more expensive.

On-premises: On-prem IT software and hardware is owned and operated within the confines of an organization. This is the traditional IT approach that many companies still use.

4 things that will sell your C-suite on hybrid cloud

As you communicate with your executives, make sure you’re clear on which approach you’re proposing for your organization. You should be able to highlight the benefits and detriments of each method and express why the hybrid cloud route makes sense for the business.

1. Ultimate flexibility

A hybrid cloud IT approach allows organizations to keep vital systems and data on-prem while rapidly adopting modern solutions, without sinking time and effort in procuring and installing new infrastructure.

Should the needs of your business change, you can switch between public and private clouds. This is particularly useful in a “cloud bursting” scenario—common in industries where workloads vary based on seasonality—where the capacity of the private cloud is exceeded. In these cases, the private cloud can handle the base level workloads while the public cloud handles seasonal excess.

Finally, and perhaps most compelling to those at the C-suite level, the systems you’ve identified as cloud-viable can be migrated at a pace and order of your choosing, so as to limit potential workforce disruption.

2. Long-term cost savings

Public cloud IT services are far more cost-effective than their alternatives, especially in businesses with seasonal peaks such as financial services in tax season or retailers during the holidays. The services available are sophisticated enough to work for a variety of businesses across a number of industries, helping your organization avoid a high-cost, custom-built solution.

A modern cloud IT approach will also reduce the time spent on system maintenance, automate user provisioning and deprovisioning, and cut down on IT busywork and tedious tasks such as password resets. For the average company, this works out to over $1.6 million in cost savings per year. And before you talk to your C-suite, you can use our ROI calculator to generate a customized report for your organization.

3. Heightened visibility and compliance

Knowing who has access to which applications and programs often involves laborious manual reporting. As a result, security breaches are more likely, and “stale” accounts go unchecked for months and even years. This both puts your organization at risk and compromises your organization at the time of an audit.

Many hybrid cloud security providers simplify this process by building quick-access reporting into their offerings. With Okta, for example, you get access to real-time security reporting, allowing you to rapidly uncover and troubleshoot security and access anomalies, and easily identify who has access to which apps.

4. Proven reliability

Both the public and private cloud are reliable in their own ways, so employing a hybrid cloud model that uses both cloud avenues can better equip your organization.

Public cloud services, for example, are shared between multiple data centers. With virtually zero downtime, they’re notably reliable. Private clouds, on the other hand, tend to be faster, with reduced latency. However, they require more infrastructure maintenance than public clouds.

Meeting in the middle

Transitioning away from on-prem infrastructure can be a hard sell if the decision makers are under the impression it’s either all or nothing, but now you have the facts to explain that’s not the case.

By demonstrating the benefits of a hybrid cloud IT model and its positive impact on the business (read: bottom line), you establish common ground with senior leadership, giving you the ammunition needed to propel your business into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Learn more about the 3 main pillars of modern IT: Single Sign On (SSO), Lifecycle Management and Access Gateway. Need a good overview to send to your C-suite? Take a look at our Creating a Modern Identity Strategy for Hybrid IT Environments webinar!