The Self-Service Future of Hybrid Cloud Hosting

Hybrid-cloud adoption is set to triple over the next three years. But as hybrid cloud grows, enterprises are already looking for ways to better manage their hybrid-hosting infrastructure needs.

In today’s modern, digital-savvy world, hosting customers increasingly want opportunities to implement more self-service processes and have autonomy over their infrastructure operations. The key to meeting this need is configuring a hybrid cloud with just the right mix of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure, combined with the flexibility to allow customers to manage it themselves.

A self-service hybrid-cloud approach will be the way forward for the hosting provider of the future, putting the power back in the hands of customers to help boost business and operational agility on both sides of the equation and, ultimately, improve customers’ bottom lines.

Power to the People

Self-service platforms were once considered to be too technical for everyday consumers to understand and effectively manage. But according to research from Forrester, customers increasingly prefer self-service as the quickest route to resolution for their business’ needs. And that growth is only expected to continue as consumers get more comfortable with IT and continue to demand effortless, do-it-yourself options.

The hosting company of the future will provide a self-service hybrid cloud that gives customers the tools they need to quickly adapt to the dynamic business requirements of the modern world. With scalable, flexible and controllable hybrid cloud solutions, companies have full reign to, for example, provision and manage pre-networked solutions with both bare-metal cloud servers and virtual cloud servers in minutes. No more time wasted waiting for a provider to process and provision a server or network for them.

It’s an approach that gives customers the ability to self-manage, but also to ask the experts whenever they need help along the way. Not only does this approach help reduce costs for both the businesses and hosting providers, but it can also enable incredible efficiencies from an operational standpoint. For instance, companies will gain instant control of processes for faster scalability, and they can customize solutions for their business’s exact specifications.

For small businesses and startups, in particular, the ease-of-use and flexibility from a self-service model is especially important to help them scale dynamically, as well as update and add processes and infrastructure, all while operating on a steep learning curve. Self-service hybrid clouds can ultimately help them achieve a smoother transition to become a more established business because they will get hands-on experience to help them grow as their company grows—but they can still tap experts for help wherever needed.

Business Agility for the Modern-Day Customer

Recent research shows that it’s not just self-service channel usage that has changed over time. In addition, today’s digital-focused customer actually thinks and behaves differently from preceding generations. They expect relevant and seamless omnichannel customer service, and they prefer to learn where to find information themselves. As such, hosting providers need to align their methods to meet the needs of this new breed of customer.

The self-service hybrid cloud combines the best of both cloud worlds. Enterprises can tap into the scalability and cost efficiencies of an off-premise public cloud while keeping core applications and traditional components on private, bare-metal infrastructure. And without a middleman to slow the flow of operations, customers can have greater control over their decision making and easily manage their own scalability, adding additional capacity or decommissioning servers at any time. This approach allows for greater business agility and flexibility across the organization.

But it’s not just the customers that are benefitting from this approach. By passing the baton and allowing customers to do as much as possible for themselves, hosting providers are freeing up their staff and operations to enable the highest productivity for themselves as well, dedicating full resources to priority requests and customer growth.

Benefits to the Bottom Line

An organization’s demand on computing resources can vary drastically at any given time, but maintaining sufficient resources to meet peak requirements can be costly. For instance, when Southwest Airlines’ website recently crashed under high consumer demand during a flash sale, company spokespeople said they had added capacity to the website but hadn’t fully prepared for such a large response.

Companies like Southwest don’t want to have to buy extra capacity if they’re unsure it’ll be used. Just like you would turn down your air conditioning or your lights if you’re not using them, businesses want to be able to adjust to their compute demands and build their hybrid environment according to the exact capacity required. By offering a self-service hybrid cloud, hosting companies can allow enterprises to easily manage and pay only for what is used, avoiding costly under- and overprovisioning while enabling a more responsive, secure and high-performance environment for users.

In addition to the scalability benefits of this utility-based model, self-service platforms save developers significant time. Often, when developers are waiting for someone else to provision a server for them, for instance, they waste a lot of time they could’ve been putting toward business-critical projects. By allowing for rapid provisioning in mere minutes or hours, not days, they can eliminate that waiting time and help the business realize revenue sooner.

A Future for Custom Cloud

With annual cloud surveys showing that one in five organizations are already using hybrid cloud models, and with the corresponding decline in the sole use of either an on-premise or off-premise cloud hosting environment, the future for hybrid cloud is positioned for positive growth. Hosting providers, however, shouldn’t be complacent in their approach to building successful hybrid-cloud environments for customers.

As the tech-savvy modern world continues to innovate and enterprises look for customizable options, enabling a self-service hybrid cloud will become the key differentiator for hosting companies. In fact, by putting some of the power back in the hands of the customers, self-service hybrid clouds could be just as impactful for hosting companies as they are for the businesses that use them.

But, that doesn’t mean that managed services will disappear. In fact, their scope will expand from helping customers allocate capacity or spin up servers, all the way through to configuration and architecture advice as well as application-specific services that can help customers derive greater value from their hosted solutions.

As the digital landscape continues to change and hybrid-cloud adoption grows, enterprises should look at how a hybrid future will serve their evolving needs.

Leading article image courtesy of Damien Pollet under a Creative Commons license

About the Author

Toby Owen is VP of Product Management for Peer 1 Hosting & Cogeco Data Services. He is responsible for global product strategy and oversees the complete product-management life cycle across the company’s entire portfolio. Before joining Peer 1, Toby was the head of international product strategy at Rackspace.