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Why 'cloud first' is losing its luster and hybrid is gaining ground
The cloud has been presented to us as the promised land.
Flexible. Scalable. Cost-effective. Secure.
And above all: the way to innovate faster than your competition.
But those who now look at their IT environment soberly - or with a gulp to drink - see something very different.
Costs are said to be decreasing while invoices show double digits more often than we care to. No, you're not seeing double ... The cloud is devouring your budget.
The real world is more unruly than the sales pitches of hyperscalers. Your old core systems are still running fine. Your compliance requirements are getting stricter. Your users demand speed and stability. And that cloud bill ... it's getting pretty out of hand by now.
More and more organizations are therefore opting not for cloud first, but for cloud when it makes sense.
And that's exactly where the hybrid cloud proves its worth.
A hybrid cloud strategy gives you the best of both worlds. You combine the agility of the public cloud with the control, speed and predictability of your own infrastructure. And you put workloads where they deliver the most value - technically and financially.
Sounds ideal.
But make no mistake: hybrid cloud is not a simple intermediate solution. It is a strategic model that fundamentally changes your IT architecture. And has many snags that in turn require specialized knowledge and skills.
Hybrid cloud is not a trend. It is a mature choice for leaders who want to stay in control.
Hello digital sovereignty: hello back in the drivers seat
For many organizations, digital sovereignty is an increasingly important reason to embrace hybrid cloud. Not out of nostalgia for on-prem, but out of strategic awareness: you can't be in control if your data, applications and processes run entirely on systems over which you have no control.
Especially in sectors with sensitive data - think of healthcare, finance, government and industry - there is a growing friction. Data that 9 times out of 10 automatically falls under foreign legislation as soon as you use certain public cloud providers. Consider the U.S. Cloud Act, which allows access to data without your knowledge.
Hybrid cloud is the way óto take back that control. By keeping critical workloads and data on your own infrastructure and only scaling to the cloud where it makes sense and is secure, you do maintain control. Control over availability, security, compliance and strategic autonomy.
Digital sovereignty is not about technology. It's about taking responsibility for your core. And hybrid cloud is in many cases the only realistic way to balance that with the flexibility that modern IT demands.
The myth of cost savings in the cloud
The promise was simple: with the cloud, IT would become cheaper. You only pay for what you use. No more investments in hardware, no more overcapacity for peaks that never come.
But in practice, IT costs are rising faster than ever before.
In many organizations, cloud costs are now the fastest-growing IT expense. Not because of extravagant growth, but because of a tangle of invisible costs: network traffic between zones, snapshot storage, idle resources, overspecified VMs and licensing models that are secretly more complex than your old data center ever was.
On top of that comes the organizational reality: many teams can create new resources with a few clicks, but no one feels responsible for cleaning them up. Governance lags behind. FinOps often doesn't look beyond, “Is it on? And so your cloud environment grows like a city without a city planner.
Hybrid cloud offers the solution here. Workloads that are predictable - or simply become too expensive in the cloud you can bring back to your own infrastructure. And at the same time, you retain the flexibility to scale where it does make sense.
It's not about cloud or no cloud.
It's about making conscious choices.
Step 1: Pierce and accept the fairy tale of “everything is cheaper in the cloud.
4 Success factors for a good hybrid cloud environment
A hybrid cloud environment offers the best of both worlds - provided you set it up properly. Without the right preconditions, it still becomes a source of delay, frustration and cost overruns. Here are the four technical preconditions that make hybrid cloud workable and manageable:
1. Interoperability is critical
Make sure your private and public cloud environments communicate effortlessly with each other. Use open standards and open protocols whenever possible so that systems remain interchangeable and flexible. Proprietary solutions seem attractive, but get in the way of your agility in the long run.
2. Think local, avoid unnecessary data transfers
Dragging data back and forth between public and private clouds costs time as well as money. Therefore, apply the locality principle: process data as much as possible where it is generated or consumed. Preferably place web, application and database servers of the same application in the same environment.
3. Actively manage your WAN capacity with QoS
Where LAN connections are wide, your WAN is limited. Without quality of service (QoS), low-priority traffic - such as print jobs - can slow down essential interaction processes. Provide smart traffic shaping so that business-critical processes are always prioritized.
4. Centralize your identity management
Security starts with identity. Choose one central source of truth for authentication and authorization. This can be in your private or public cloud. In private cloud you have more control, in public cloud you benefit from scalability. Most important: make a conscious choice and keep it consistent.
Hybrid cloud: more control, more space, fewer surprises
Hybrid cloud is not a compromise. It is increasingly a must. The strategic choice for organizations that want to be agile without losing control. You get more governance, because you control where your data lives and how your workloads are distributed. You get greater flexibility, because you can scale where it makes sense - without being locked into one vendor or model. You get better compliance, because you keep sensitive data local and can comply with laws and regulations. And you get better cost control, because you can place workloads where they run most cost-effectively.
And it does require thoughtful choices. Not a standard blueprint, but an approach that fits your landscape, your risks and your ambitions.
As optimization experts, we work daily with hybrid cloud solutions and see every time how much savings it brings.
Want to know how much you can save with a hybrid cloud decision and what else it means for your organization?
👉 Schedule an appointment with me.
Together we'll make sure your cloud environment serves your strategy again - and not the other way around.