“You don’t need to choose, just go hybrid” – Juniper Networks

Feras Abu Aladous, Systems Engineering Sr. Manager, META at Juniper Networks, has pleaded with businesses to adopt a hybrid cloud model as it gives them the flexibility, availability and accessibility needed to thrive in the constantly evolving digital economy. 

The United Arab Emirates’ economy is constantly evolving. From fishing and pearls to oil and natural gas, the UAE has emerged as one of the most influential countries in the MENA region and beyond.  

Nowadays, the UAE is once again in a transitional phase, shifting from an oil dependent economy to a diverse, data-led economy.  

In this context, digitisation is essential when discussing either the nation’s goal for a smart economy or increased value creation through technology competitiveness.  

Cloud technology has been one of the drivers helping companies in the UAE inch closer to succeed in digitisation and it also plays a key role in businesses growth. 

State-of-the-art communications and cloud infrastructure are at the heart of the UAE’s vision of a completely digital society and economy.  

It is worth noting that according to Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will amount to $5.7 billion in 2022, an increase of 19.2 percent compared to 2021. 

Public vs. Private Cloud 

For businesses using legacy applications, relying on a private cloud may seem like a desirable option since these applications can retain their function.  

The main distinction between a private and a public cloud is that the private cloud is built using hardware owned by the organisation. In theory, increased security also results from not sharing resources with a third party.  

However, in order to run a data centre, you must pre-purchase all of the required capacity. The organization must also handle all hardware maintenance. 

Scalability 

Contrarily, since the cloud provider manages all hardware-related tasks, using the public cloud does not necessitate any purchases.  

Any organisation can scale the cloud to accommodate their requirements and can take advantage of pay-as-you-go pricing. There are disadvantages, though.  

For instance, you may not have access to low-level server resources and some workloads may not function properly in a public cloud environment. Not to mention organisations have been known to experience sticker shock when they start getting their monthly bills from public cloud providers. 

You do not Have to Choose – Just Go Hybrid 

Hybrid Cloud is essentially a combination of public and private cloud resources.  

The public and private clouds are combined in a way that gives organisations the best of both worlds.  

Going hybrid does not require a company to prematurely retire its current hardware, which might have been a significant investment. In a hybrid cloud system, on-premises resources are still used, but they are integrated with public cloud resources. As a result, an organisation may continue to leverage the hardware in its own data centres. 

Juniper Public 

The Advantages of Hybrid Cloud 

Flexibility 

The truth is that there are several compelling reasons to choose the hybrid cloud route. First of all, hybrid cloud offers unrivalled flexibility.  

For example, an organisation is free to host workloads and data in the most proper location, based on a variety of factors such as cost, compliance requirements and workload logistics.  

It also provides excellent on-demand scalability, without requiring any hardware investment. If there is a need to scale up a workload, organisations may simply employ public cloud resources or even purchase extra resources for a certain period. 

Hybrid clouds are ideal for accommodating temporary workloads. For example, if an organisation needed to provision a new workload temporarily, going with a public cloud simplifies provisioning. 

Availability 

Furthermore, hybrid cloud offers high availability. It provides resilience and protection for organisations’ services and data storage against security threats and outages.  

For instance, if the private cloud is inaccessible, the public cloud continues to operate and serve users. In addition, by implementing a Zero Trust security model in their hybrid cloud solution, companies can enhance their security. 

Balance 

Of course, hybrid cloud enables organisations to better manage their economics, by balancing capital and operating expenses, and taking advantage of pricing competition among public cloud and infrastructure vendors.  

Organisations may also provide additional functionality to their customers by employing a public cloud service without having to recruit staff or spend their own time administering the service and all its dependencies.  

This allows them to allocate resources for innovation to still achieve business growth during volatile times. 

Accessibility 

Hybrid clouds use resources residing both locally in an organisation’s own data centre and in the public cloud.  

And having all these resources at your disposal makes it very easy to provision and deploy new workloads at a moment’s notice, thereby helping to make the organisation far more agile than it might otherwise be. 

Security 

Hybrid cloud can help an organisation to achieve business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities that might otherwise be out of reach.  

One of the most popular use cases for hybrid cloud is to configure workloads that are running on premises to automatically fail over to the public cloud, should something happen in the organisation’s own data centre.  

Hybrid clouds are often also used for disaster recovery purposes. For example, workloads running on premise might be backed up to public cloud resources. 

Although hybrid cloud may appear complex, there is nothing to worry about as long as a competent partner is chosen to facilitate the transition and manage the hybrid infrastructure. 

Business agility, as well as network reliability and security, are required for success in the digital Juniper Public economy.  

To accomplish all three, Juniper Networks can assist organisations of all sizes in modernising and automating their data centre infrastructure and operations.