Small and midsize businesses are placing hybrid cloud high on their priority lists.

A combination of on-premises and public cloud services, the hybrid cloud delivers the best of both worlds: the responsiveness of corporate servers and the expandability of public cloud services.

The hybrid cloud is having a significant impact on SMBs. They are transitioning to cloud storage, Office 365, and public cloud providers such as AWS and AZURE – to minimise the on-premises footprint to reduce overhead costs. The surge among smaller companies is notable because SMBs reap greater benefits from hybrid IT than their enterprise counterparts due to several factors. Arguably, the biggest gain is the late-mover benefit: They got started later on hybrid and cloud in general and can leverage more mature, easier-to-implement, and more cost-effective solutions.

Hybrid IT: A more efficient operation

To bring their technology wish lists to fruition, SMB IT leaders will need to grapple with some traditional challenges, namely lack of in-house expertise and security concerns; other issues SMBs face are under-utilisation of resources, too many disparate and disconnected tools, infrastructure that is too complex, and demand that exceeds IT resources.

As SMBs implement hybrid cloud strategies, the right partner can help. The cloud experience should be open and seamless. The best partner doesn’t have an agenda – with in-house expertise at a premium, SMB IT leaders require wholly reliable IT infrastructure. As those decision-makers evaluate IT infrastructure, their top criteria are ease of upgrades, quality service and support, standards compliance, and integration and interoperability with existing infrastructure.

SMB IT infrastructure criteria

With these trends in mind, it’s clear that SMBs systems that are easy to deploy, maintain, and manage, will get the nod over complex systems that require intensive staff involvement.

CiCloud: the perfect SMB partner

Here at Centerprise, with our CiCloud offering, we have partnered with HPE for Servers, Storage, and networking under HPE Greenlake, CloudSigma for public cloud secure multi-tenant provisioning for IAAS & PAS, and the ARK Data Centre for secure (Crown commercial service certified) and high energy efficiency COLO hosting for our CiCloud implementation which we see as a perfect for SMB customers’ requirements.

We’ll be providing high performance, flexible, public cloud IAAS, Backup aaS, Disaster Recovery aaS, PAAS focused on dev-ops all supported by Centerprise Consulting IT services for Managed cloud capabilities.

Contact us now

More blog posts on other aspects of CiCloud soon. Don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.