1. Cost benefits: Reducing capital expenditure is a primary incentive for organizations to consider moving to a hybrid cloud infrastructure that includes storage. The incremental costs of adding and maintaining local storage—such as servers and new on-premises data centers—can be expensive. Hybrid cloud storage enables companies to reduce such expenses by tapping the expansive power of the hybrid cloud model and allowing companies to pay for public cloud service only when they need it.

2. Scalability: Hybrid cloud deployment models offer the best of both private and public worlds. Business-critical data and operations can remain in the private cloud, and companies can tap into the flexibility and power of public cloud storage to seamlessly increase their operational capacity when their computing demands spike.

3. Innovation: Hybrid cloud storage enables enterprises to accelerate innovation by allowing companies to more easily develop new applications and run powerful analytics programs that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for smaller companies using on-site servers.

4. Security: Hybrid cloud computing gives businesses control over their data and improves security by reducing the potential exposure of critical data. Organizations decide where to house their data and workloads based on policy, compliance and security requirements.

5. Business continuity: Hybrid cloud storage is a critical part of a company’s business continuity strategy, allowing them to back up data by duplicating critical data to the cloud and ensuring that, in the event of a disaster or other computing failure, business operations will continue uninterrupted. Hybrid environments also allow the cloud to absorb workload surges, so as computing demands increase or suddenly spike, the business isn’t at risk of overburdening its private servers.

Since technology is integral to an organization’s performance and competitiveness, identifying smart investments in IT modernization becomes even more necessary. Prioritizing agility, while also reducing costs and mitigating risks, is where hybrid cloud storage is often seen as a solution.

Whether a company has multiple locations, a global footprint, or a workforce that frequently works remotely, a hybrid cloud file storage model can benefit such organizations. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic that has resulted in many employees suddenly having to work from home, hybrid cloud storage enables business continuity by allowing users to access data from anywhere.

Cloud storage vendors offer various models, with a private cloud being one option. Private cloud users have the cloud to themselves and data storage is usually managed on-premises, by the private cloud owner. By contrast, public cloud storage users share computing services among multiple businesses, even though each company’s data and applications in the cloud are encrypted and hidden from the other tenants.

Hybrid cloud combines these two cloud deployment models, allowing data to be transferred between private and public cloud environments, as business necessitates. Certain hybrid environments also include a multi-cloud solution, which utilizes services from multiple public cloud providers.