In today’s constantly evolving business climate, IT leaders are continually put under enormous pressure to adapt. While the demands grow, many times IT budgets don’t keep pace making the situation even more challenging. One way forward thinking organizations are solving this problem is through the use of hybrid cloud solutions. 

Leveraging public cloud platforms like vCloud Air from VMware allows you to meet these ever-increasing requirements in a cost effective way. According to Gartner, one out of five enterprises manage hybrid clouds today and nearly half of all organizations will adopt some form of hybrid cloud implementation by 2017.

Here are three common challenges IT leaders face and how a hybrid cloud solution can help overcome them.

1. Handling Temporary Spike Workloads – Chances are your organization faces wide variation in workload due to seasonal business ebbs and flows. One way to address this issue is to invest in on-premises hardware to meet workload peaks. Not only is this an expensive way to go, it also wastes valuable resources that will sit idle during slower business periods.

Instead of a costly capital expense, many organizations leverage a service like vCloud Air that provides a scalable solution for peak workload times. You are able to spin up applications and expand to handle short shelf life workloads when you need to and only pay for the resources used. This consumption-based model is significantly more cost effective than purchasing expensive new hardware for an on-premises data center.

2. Establishing Disaster Recovery Programs – Without IT systems, the vast majority of organizations simply cease to operate. While most businesses recognize this, they often are unable or unwilling to pay for redundant hardware infrastructure that will only be used in the case of an event.

A recovery-as-a-service solution like VMware’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is built on a hybrid cloud platform and provides powerful, asynchronous replication capabilities at the hypervisor layer. This is a much more economically attractive solution for replicating storage data. With this type of consumption based model you only pay for the storage capability and computing resources you use when a disaster occurs. In case of such an event, you are able to get systems back up quickly by leveraging these hybrid cloud resources.

3. Managing Growth – The goal of most businesses is to increase revenue to drive profitability. Unfortunately, this growth, and the activity that comes with it, is never a straight-line proposition. There are spurts of growth followed by plateau periods, so balancing the appropriate IT resources is difficult.

Leveraging a hybrid cloud solution gives you the flexibility to scale comfortably. As business activity and workload grow, overflow can be routed to a public cloud. If a particular level of activity appears to be sustainable, you may want to invest in on-premises hardware, but you can do it at your own pace and without the pressure to meet day-to-day workloads.

Scalability, availability, and cost effectiveness are all key benefits of deploying a hybrid cloud infrastructure. The business environment continues to be volatile, so having a flexible solution to address major IT challenges is something every organization should strongly consider.