After years of grinding – late nights, nonstop prospecting, constantly tweaking your pitch deck – your offering is finally established. You have happy customers, a healthy sales pipeline, and a high-functioning product with an exciting roadmap. Great things are ahead!
In short, it’s a new era for your organization. And as you adjust to the new normal, you finally have time to step back and consider whether the infrastructure that got you here is right to carry you forward through the next phase of growth.
Specifically, if you launched as a cloud-native organization, you’re probably wondering whether staying entirely in the public cloud is the most practical option now that you’ve achieved a steady state.
If that sounds like you, you’re in the right place. Here’s an overview of how a hybrid cloud setup can meet your needs in your scale-up phase.
Hybrid Cloud for Scale-Ups: What Does it Look Like?
Let’s be clear about one thing right off the bat: embracing a hybrid cloud architecture doesn’t mean leaving the public cloud entirely.
For most companies, the public cloud is an excellent home for specific types of workloads. But for others, it isn’t a great fit. This is something organizations often recognize when they get a larger-than-expected bill from their public cloud provider.
Shifting to a hybrid cloud setup isn’t only about saving money, however. Before we talk about the benefits, though, let’s get a quick definition on the books.
Often, the transition to hybrid cloud happens as a company shifts from startup mode to scale-up. The public cloud is an excellent environment for experimenting in part because of how easy it is to access more resources.
But as a company reaches a steady state, it’s often more efficient or cost-effective to run workloads in different environments.
For example, a company that provides AI analysis of medical imaging might initially run everything in the public cloud as it lands on product-market fit and grows its customer base. But as it discovers that its most valuable customers tend to want images sent to local Epic instances, it recognizes that sending image data – or any substantial type of data – in and out of the cloud is driving up costs in an unexpected way.
When the company decides to focus on this customer group as its primary use case, its leaders research hybrid cloud options to reduce data transmission costs.
That’s just one of many ways a hybrid cloud setup might benefit a maturing company. Now let’s look more broadly at the benefits hybrid cloud can offer.
Key Benefits of Hybrid Cloud: Financial, Operational, Technical
First, let’s look at the financial benefits of hybrid cloud. As I mentioned, the unpredictability of public cloud costs is often a driving force in the exploration of hybrid cloud. But it’s important to emphasize that hybrid cloud doesn’t necessarily mean lower costs. Instead, hybrid cloud offers these financial benefits:
- More predictable costs: The pricing terms and conditions associated with hybrid cloud tend to be much clearer than those associated with public cloud, meaning you’re less likely to have heart palpitations when you see your monthly invoice.
- Lower personnel costs: It’s entirely possible to manage and measure public cloud resources so you’re always optimized. However, it can be hard to find people with that skill set. It’s also expensive to keep them on staff. Then there's the opportunity cost element: do you really want top-notch IT folks on staff managing your infrastructure rather than building out new products and features?
- Lower overall costs: While lower costs aren’t the sole reason to consider hybrid cloud, it’s also true that many organizations that go hybrid after being fully in the public cloud are able to save money consistently.
- More efficient spend: In many cases, a hybrid cloud setup gives you more flexibility to invest in the things that matter most to your business, whether that’s geographic redundancy or lower latency.
But there's more to running a business than money. Hybrid cloud setups can also offer compelling operational benefits, including:
- Uptime and reliability: As you scale up, the thing that matters most to your customers is that your product reliably works as it’s supposed to at all times. While the public cloud is generally good on uptime, you have more flexibility to customize your setup in a private cloud.
- Better compliance: As you scale (across industries, geographies, etc.), compliance only becomes more complex. Because hybrid cloud allows for greater customization, you can accommodate more complicated compliance needs in a hybrid setting.
Finally, there are the technical benefits that hybrid cloud can offer. Briefly, these benefits come from matching the right environment to the right workload. That’s a simple enough concept, but it can lead to dramatic benefits.
For example, consider our AI imaging company from above. It launched its services in the public cloud, but as it found product-market fit, it realized data egress fees would be too great if it continued storing images there. So its IT team worked with a knowledgeable partner to identify a better environment for data storage and related workloads.
With the money they’re saving on data egress, they’re able to maintain prices for customers and hire new IT talent to build out V2 of the product.
This type of technical challenge is common for scale-up companies: it’s often unclear at launch what various costs might be at scale. It’s hard to predict when you’re going to cross network segments or when clients will request data moving out to their systems.
But as those things become clear, adapting your cloud infrastructure as needed is essential to position your organization for its next phase of growth.
Making the Leap: How Do You Transition from Public Cloud to Hybrid?
If you’re among the many startups that launched in the public cloud, you likely don’t have hybrid cloud knowledge in house. That’s fine. There's a whole ecosystem of partners who can help you not only identify where your workloads should go but also manage your hosting setup on an ongoing basis so you don’t need to worry about hiring data center staff.
In most engagements, the first step will be a workload assessment, which involves determining the right environment for each workload, meaning the one that lets you…
- Maximize uptime and reliability;
- Manage costs;
- Deliver expected performance; and
- Focus your time and energy on growing your business rather than managing your infrastructure.
From there, you can expect to discuss a transition plan that lets you get where you want to be in a way that’s minimally disruptive to your customers. Depending on the nature and complexity of the transition, the process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years.
Focus on Your Product, Not Your Infrastructure
It’s natural to have different needs as a scale-up than you did as a startup. That manifests in every part of the organization: you may need to hire for different skills or partner with new agencies. You may need to reorient development cycles around maintenance as much as innovation.
Assessing your infrastructure is an important part of adjusting the makeup of your organization for the opportunities and challenges that await in the next phase.
Familiarizing yourself with your options now will empower you to leverage infrastructure as a growth enabler in the years to come. Ready to get started? Let’s talk!
Michael Meyer
As Summit's Vice President of Product & Strategy, Michael Meyer brings decades of hands-on experience in data center infrastructure, compliance, and enterprise IT strategy. Throughout his career, he’s built and led high-performing support and operations teams, developed technical sales training programs, and launched multiple businesses. Michael is known for bridging the gap between technology and strategy, helping organizations design resilient, secure systems that scale.
