Asia Pacific is well and truly the key to growth and opportunity for businesses, with the region contributing to over 60 percent of the global GDP. Since it also houses more than 4 billion unique mobile users, offering mobile applications with an elevated level of customer service will be a key differentiator and paramount to tapping into the region’s economic potential.
Organisations continue to choose cloud to be their default deployment choice — with plans for a hybrid/multicloud future — to effectively address customers’ demand for an ongoing stream of differentiated services, features, and experiences. In fact, IDC found that 70 percent of organisations have deployed multicloud environments, and 64 percent of applications in a typical IT portfolio today are based in either a public or private cloud environment.
Hybrid cloud can empower organisations to use digital capabilities and technologies to help them be service delivery ready and encourage business agility. It allows organisations to focus on innovating rather than chugging along by providing a consistent environment to build, deploy, and manage applications, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2019 report, only 30 percent of organisations have a hybrid cloud strategy. For a hybrid cloud to help accelerate innovation, it should not be built as an afterthought. Here are four questions organisations should ask themselves as they develop a hybrid cloud strategy:
Unlocking your hybrid cloud potential
Although hybrid cloud can offer the flexibility and business agility required to thrive in the non-static business environment, these benefits can only be reaped if the hybrid cloud is built on a foundation that offers security and operational consistency. To achieve this, some organisations are building their hybrid cloud on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In fact, a recent study by IDC found that RHEL is most frequently used for enterprise management and production (26 percent) and IT infrastructure (20 percent).
Cathay Pacific is one such organisation. By migrating from its legacy infrastructure to a hybrid cloud architecture that is built on RHEL, the Hong Kong airline can now better scale its IT infrastructure to meet evolving application requirements. The new hybrid cloud infrastructure also helped Cathay Pacific to reduce its provisioning times from weeks to under an hour, enabling it to be more responsive to business demands and bring new customer-facing services to market faster.
Organisations need to adopt hybrid cloud strategies in order to catalyse innovation, rather than simply viewing it as a technology stack for productivity. Asia Pacific is well and truly pioneering new opportunities for organisations. It’s important for organisations to capitalise on these opportunities and build their hybrid cloud on a secure and consistent foundation that enables the better delivery of services and workloads. With this in mind, unlocking your hybrid cloud strategy and overcoming the common challenges to adoption, will enable your organisaiton to sustain success through hybrid clouds and provide customers with an elevated level of service.