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Real-World Outages Make the Case for Hybrid Cloud

Jim Rapoza

The amount of data, research and case studies on the benefits and effectiveness of hybrid cloud keeps growing. Yet some people are still skeptical, thinking that it’s just a play to keep data centers relevant in a public cloud age.


Well, sometimes it takes a splash of ice-cold water to wake people up to reality. And some recent outages of cloud-based systems may be just the thing to bring hybrid cloud skeptics around.

Probably the biggest example of this was the outage of Amazon’s S3 service in late February, which left many sites down or performing poorly for hours. In the public cloud business, there’s no bigger name than Amazon, and they are definitely the safe choice; Amazon is probably the closest thing the cloud has to the old adage of “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

There were a lot of lessons to come out of the outage, one of them being that a service mainly used for cloud storage was still able to bring down so many sites. But that’s for another article.

But one lesson I found particularly interesting had to do with the benefits that came to businesses taking a hybrid cloud approach.

Typically, businesses turn to a hybrid cloud to add more reliability to their on-premise systems. With public cloud integrated with their on-premise infrastructure, they are able to add extensive disaster recovery and backup capabilities, while also leveraging the public cloud for a performance boost or to meet peak traffic demands.

However, the recent public cloud issues have shown that sometimes on-premise can become a backup for the public cloud. That’s because when the public cloud has had issues, organizations with a hybrid approach have been able to leverage their on-premise infrastructure to essentially provide backup protection for their public cloud services, allowing them to keep their services up and running in cases where businesses that were 100% public cloud were stuck waiting for the outage to end.

That seems to be a pretty good argument for how hybrid cloud delivers even more benefits than many expect. Businesses adopting a hybrid approach don’t have their heads in the cloud when it comes to understanding the benefits it provides. For them, hybrid cloud is making sure that they see nothing but blue skies in performance and reliability, even when the public cloud is experiencing some nasty storms.

Jim Rapoza is an Aberdeen Senior Research Analyst.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Real-World Outages Make the Case for Hybrid Cloud

Jim Rapoza

The amount of data, research and case studies on the benefits and effectiveness of hybrid cloud keeps growing. Yet some people are still skeptical, thinking that it’s just a play to keep data centers relevant in a public cloud age.


Well, sometimes it takes a splash of ice-cold water to wake people up to reality. And some recent outages of cloud-based systems may be just the thing to bring hybrid cloud skeptics around.

Probably the biggest example of this was the outage of Amazon’s S3 service in late February, which left many sites down or performing poorly for hours. In the public cloud business, there’s no bigger name than Amazon, and they are definitely the safe choice; Amazon is probably the closest thing the cloud has to the old adage of “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

There were a lot of lessons to come out of the outage, one of them being that a service mainly used for cloud storage was still able to bring down so many sites. But that’s for another article.

But one lesson I found particularly interesting had to do with the benefits that came to businesses taking a hybrid cloud approach.

Typically, businesses turn to a hybrid cloud to add more reliability to their on-premise systems. With public cloud integrated with their on-premise infrastructure, they are able to add extensive disaster recovery and backup capabilities, while also leveraging the public cloud for a performance boost or to meet peak traffic demands.

However, the recent public cloud issues have shown that sometimes on-premise can become a backup for the public cloud. That’s because when the public cloud has had issues, organizations with a hybrid approach have been able to leverage their on-premise infrastructure to essentially provide backup protection for their public cloud services, allowing them to keep their services up and running in cases where businesses that were 100% public cloud were stuck waiting for the outage to end.

That seems to be a pretty good argument for how hybrid cloud delivers even more benefits than many expect. Businesses adopting a hybrid approach don’t have their heads in the cloud when it comes to understanding the benefits it provides. For them, hybrid cloud is making sure that they see nothing but blue skies in performance and reliability, even when the public cloud is experiencing some nasty storms.

Jim Rapoza is an Aberdeen Senior Research Analyst.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...