February 11, 2025
Hybrid Cloud Storage Benefits: More Secure, Accessible and Economical
When strategically deployed and designed, hybrid storage solutions help organizations meet modern challenges.
The unprecedented volume of data stored by organizations today presents an incredible opportunity, especially when paired with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. However, data storage and protection are significant challenges, and many organizations struggle to optimize and secure their environments. The threat of cyberattacks, natural disasters, hardware failures and talent shortages exacerbate this challenge, and organizations that fail to protect themselves risk data breaches and costly downtime.
Hybrid storage environments, which incorporate resources from on-premises data centers and public cloud vendors, offer critical capabilities including seamless data mobility and access, simplified management and control, and improved cyber resilience. When designed and implemented effectively, hybrid solutions can support regulatory compliance, data analytics, business continuity and other critical benefits that help organizations achieve their most important business and mission goals.
Hybrid storage solutions can help your organization achieve its goals.
The unprecedented volume of data stored by organizations today presents an incredible opportunity, especially when paired with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. However, data storage and protection are significant challenges, and many organizations struggle to optimize and secure their environments. The threat of cyberattacks, natural disasters, hardware failures and talent shortages exacerbate this challenge, and organizations that fail to protect themselves risk data breaches and costly downtime.
Hybrid storage environments, which incorporate resources from on-premises data centers and public cloud vendors, offer critical capabilities including seamless data mobility and access, simplified management and control, and improved cyber resilience. When designed and implemented effectively, hybrid solutions can support regulatory compliance, data analytics, business continuity and other critical benefits that help organizations achieve their most important business and mission goals.
Hybrid storage solutions can help
your organization achieve its goals.
Organizations are storing and protecting more information than ever. But data isn’t just growing in volume, it’s also growing in value.
Solutions such as analytics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) are helping to uncover mission-critical insights that previously remained buried under mountains of data. These technologies require IT and business leaders to rethink how they store and protect their information. Organizations can no longer afford to indiscriminately fill data lakes without a clear understanding of the data's location and purpose. Rather, emerging technologies require constant, immediate access to data, creating the need for infrastructure that stores data near the point where it will be processed. These infrastructure solutions must evolve to be fast, reliable, compliant, resilient and intelligent, leveraging modern technologies such as AI and data insights to meet the diverse data needs of users across the organization.
At the same time, cyberthreats are growing in number and sophistication. As organizations store more data in more places, potential vulnerabilities multiply, even as attackers grow more aggressive. Sophisticated hackers once focused primarily on launching ransomware, phishing and other attacks against large enterprises. A new wave of less experienced threat actors has emerged, targeting small and midsized businesses with the help of AI to enhance their malicious efforts. Partly in recognition of these threats, governments around the world have passed a number of new data safety regulations, with stiff penalties for noncompliance.
For many organizations, the current moment represents something of a crossroads for their data infrastructure strategies. The trends of the past decade have resulted in huge cloud investments. For some, this has meant storage bills that were higher than expected. A number of organizations are in the process of trying to repatriate their data from the public cloud, especially as analytics, AI and IoT applications drive the need to move and access that data far more frequently than in the past.
Looking ahead, IT and business leaders must prioritize the modernization of their infrastructure, ensuring that it delivers resilient data storage and protection that guarantees exceptional performance, data immutability and near-constant uptime. Often, these solutions come in the form of hybrid infrastructure that leverages both on-premises and public cloud resources.
61%
The percentage of organizations leveraging the public cloud for data storage (54% of data professionals say they would prefer to store data on-premises)
Source: DataCore, The State of Data Storage 2024, November 2024
Nearly all organizations are already taking advantage of both private and public computing and storage. A 2024 report noted that 89% of organizations now employ a multicloud model. To unlock the benefits of their environments, however, organizations must be strategic about their investments. It isn’t simply the use of both private and public infrastructure that drives down costs and improves data availability. Instead, deliberate decisions must be made about when and how to leverage each environment for applications that are growing more complex.
Ideally, these decisions will be informed by a comprehensive infrastructure assessment that identifies essential data throughout an organization, as well as important regulatory and security considerations. Organizations that invest now in robust, resilient data storage and protection solutions won’t only protect themselves against current threats and optimize their environments for existing opportunities, they will also position themselves to seamlessly adapt to whatever comes next.
The right hybrid storage infrastructure
can help protect your organization’s
data and prepare it for future needs.
Organizations are storing and protecting more information than ever. But data isn’t just growing in volume, it’s also growing in value.
Solutions such as analytics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) are helping to uncover mission-critical insights that previously remained buried under mountains of data. These technologies require IT and business leaders to rethink how they store and protect their information. Organizations can no longer afford to indiscriminately fill data lakes without a clear understanding of the data's location and purpose. Rather, emerging technologies require constant, immediate access to data, creating the need for infrastructure that stores data near the point where it will be processed. These infrastructure solutions must evolve to be fast, reliable, compliant, resilient and intelligent, leveraging modern technologies such as AI and data insights to meet the diverse data needs of users across the organization.
At the same time, cyberthreats are growing in number and sophistication. As organizations store more data in more places, potential vulnerabilities multiply, even as attackers grow more aggressive. Sophisticated hackers once focused primarily on launching ransomware, phishing and other attacks against large enterprises. A new wave of less experienced threat actors has emerged, targeting small and midsized businesses with the help of AI to enhance their malicious efforts. Partly in recognition of these threats, governments around the world have passed a number of new data safety regulations, with stiff penalties for noncompliance.
For many organizations, the current moment represents something of a crossroads for their data infrastructure strategies. The trends of the past decade have resulted in huge cloud investments. For some, this has meant storage bills that were higher than expected. A number of organizations are in the process of trying to repatriate their data from the public cloud, especially as analytics, AI and IoT applications drive the need to move and access that data far more frequently than in the past.
Looking ahead, IT and business leaders must prioritize the modernization of their infrastructure, ensuring that it delivers resilient data storage and protection that guarantees exceptional performance, data immutability and near-constant uptime. Often, these solutions come in the form of hybrid infrastructure that leverages both on-premises and public cloud resources.
Nearly all organizations are already taking advantage of both private and public computing and storage. A 2024 report noted that 89% of organizations now employ a multicloud model. To unlock the benefits of their environments, however, organizations must be strategic about their investments. It isn’t simply the use of both private and public infrastructure that drives down costs and improves data availability. Instead, deliberate decisions must be made about when and how to leverage each environment for applications that are growing more complex.
Ideally, these decisions will be informed by a comprehensive infrastructure assessment that identifies essential data throughout an organization, as well as important regulatory and security considerations. Organizations that invest now in robust, resilient data storage and protection solutions won’t only protect themselves against current threats and optimize their environments for existing opportunities, they will also position themselves to seamlessly adapt to whatever comes next.
61%
The percentage of organizations leveraging the public cloud for data storage (54% of data professionals say they would prefer to store data on-premises)
Source: DataCore, The State of Data Storage 2024, November 2024
The right hybrid storage infrastructure
can help protect your organization’s
data and prepare it for future needs.
The Data Storage Landscape
47%
The percentage of cloud storage bills that represent data retrieval, transfer, egress and analytics rather than baseline storage capacity
Source: Wasabi, Wasabi 2024 Cloud Storage Index Report, February 2024
36%
The percentage of organizations that cite data security as a “must-have” capability of their data initiatives, followed by data quality (32%) and data privacy (29%)
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, The State of DataOps: Unleashing the Power of Data, January 2024
26%
The percentage of data professionals who say their organizations’ current storage infrastructure lacks high availability (25% say they lack sufficient performance and 23% say they lack data immutability)
Source: DataCore, The State of Data Storage 2024, November 2024
Money Matters
47%
The percentage of cloud storage bills that represent data retrieval, transfer, egress and analytics rather than baseline storage capacity
Source: Wasabi, Wasabi 2024 Cloud Storage Index Report, February 2024
36%
The percentage of organizations that cite data security as a “must-have” capability of their data initiatives, followed by data quality (32%) and data privacy (29%)
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, The State of DataOps: Unleashing the Power of Data, January 2024
26%
The percentage of data professionals who say their organizations’ current storage infrastructure lacks high availability (25% say they lack sufficient performance and 23% say they lack data immutability)
Source: DataCore, The State of Data Storage 2024, November 2024
- THE CHALLENGES OF DATA PROTECTION
- THE POWER OF HYBRID STORAGE
- HYBRID STORAGE: KEY BENEFITS
Emerging technologies create exciting (and, in some cases, revolutionary) business opportunities. But they also introduce new complexities and vulnerabilities. Organizations must embrace data infrastructure and strategies that help them navigate the compounding challenges of growing cybersecurity threats, more extreme natural disasters, persistent hardware failures and lingering talent shortages, all while maintaining the performance and availability demanded by modern applications.
CYBERSECURITY THREATS: Cyberattacks in general, and ransomware attacks in particular, have continued to grow in number and sophistication. Modern attacks have moved beyond amateurish phishing emails littered with typos. Today’s attackers are incredibly adept at targeting users by impersonating executives, customers and suppliers. According to one 2024 report, only 25% of organizations say they were not hit by ransomware over the previous year, and 26% report that they were hit four or more times. Still, according to CDW research, just 38% of IT and security professionals say they are “very confident” that their organizations have sufficient visibility into their cybersecurity environments, signaling that there is more work to do in this area.
NATURAL DISASTERS: The frequency of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, flash flooding and wildfires, has risen sharply in recent years. Climate scientists largely attribute the development to climate change, and projections indicate that this trend will continue. These natural disasters pose multiple threats to IT infrastructure, including direct physical damage, extended power outages, cooling system failures and supply chain disruptions. With the cost of IT downtime reaching as high as $9,000 per minute according to some estimates, organizations must invest in disaster recovery tools and processes that allow them to keep their environments running even during bouts of extreme weather. It is also critical to regularly test disaster recovery solutions.
HARDWARE FAILURE: The computing demands of AI and analytics applications expose IT infrastructure to significant stress, which can lead to more frequent and significant hardware failures. A hardware failure can lead to major data loss for an organization, as well as lost productivity. To address these issues, some organizations are keeping spare hardware on hand, allowing them to swap in new pieces of equipment to support critical workloads rather than waiting for new infrastructure to be shipped after a failure, but solutions that enable resilient data backup can also speed recovery. Investments in modern data storage infrastructure can mitigate this need somewhat, as these solutions typically offer built-in redundancy.
SCARCE TALENT: The best data management plans can’t succeed without skilled IT professionals to implement them. While competition is stiff for top talent in virtually all areas of technology, cybersecurity professionals are in particularly high demand. According to CDW research, 45% of IT and security professionals report that the majority of their job stress is due to a lack of staff. Training, automation and outsourcing are all effective ways to address the challenges they face due to a shortage of IT talent. CDW research also found that 74% of IT and security professionals report that their organizations already outsource some aspects of IT security.
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Services To Optimize Hybrid Storage Solutions
For many organizations, third-party services are a key factor driving the success of their data and infrastructure strategies. CDW offers a variety of services that help organizations optimize their storage environments.
Advisory and Consulting Services: CDW’s experts help organizations from across industries define their pain points, architect new storage solutions and create roadmaps to ensure that IT investments advance critical business objectives.
Configuration and Integration Services: By outsourcing configuration and integration, organizations can accelerate the deployment of new storage infrastructure, keep internal teams focused on core business, and prevent common issues associated with integrating on-premises and cloud storage environments.
Cybersecurity Services: CDW’s security services range from maturity assessments and architecture workshops to incident response and remediation. Through these services, organizations can identify and shore up gaps that put their most important data at risk.
Managed Services: A managed services engagement, including continuous monitoring and management of hybrid storage environments, helps ensure uptime, compliance and security. With a team of more than 1,000 certified experts, CDW can offer around-the-clock support.
There is more to hybrid storage solutions than a simple mix of on-premises and public cloud resources. Business and IT leaders must take care to architect and build their hybrid storage infrastructure in a way that deliberately leverages the benefits of each environment, matching different data types with the specific resources that best meet business needs around access, control, cost and recovery. Many organizations have found that they benefit from a trusted third-party partner, such as CDW, that can provide crucial, vendor-agnostic advice.
Data Mobility and Access: By optimizing data mobility and access, organizations can better support data-intensive workloads such as AI and analytics applications while maintaining cost control. Additionally, exploring decentralized storage solutions can significantly improve data locality, which is crucial for the performance of latency-sensitive applications such as IoT and AI. A well-designed hybrid storage solution will typically include: high-performance flash memory for frequently accessed data, as well as slower hard disk drives for archival data; tiering features that automatically move data between different storage tiers based on access patterns, which helps optimize performance and utilization; and multiprotocol capabilities that support data access protocols including Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI), Network File System (NFS), Server Message Block (SMB) and Simple Storage Service (S3). The result is superior flexibility that allows for seamless data mobility and access, enabling organizations to store and retrieve diverse data types from various sources using a single unified system. Multiprotocol storage offers several important benefits: cost-efficiency (since less important data is stored on less expensive storage infrastructure); improved performance (due to the use of high-performance storage for frequently used data); and scalability (because organizations can easily expand capacity by adding new drives or tiers). Additionally, by leveraging hybrid storage solutions, organizations are able to incorporate decentralized storage strategies that enhance responsiveness to application demands, ensuring that critical data is accessible where it's needed most. This capability ultimately drives innovation and efficiency, allowing for seamless access to data across multiple locations and optimizing performance for data-intensive applications.
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Management and Control: Even though hybrid storage environments place data in multiple environments (and often with an array of different vendors), modern hybrid management platforms offer organizations seamless management and control over their data. The consolidated view provided by hybrid management platforms gives IT leaders centralized oversight, allowing them to quickly spot inefficiencies, redundancies and other problems. Management consoles also typically feature built-in analytics and reporting capabilities that help track storage metrics and predict future capacity needs. As a result, leaders can optimize resource allocations in their storage environments, leading to long-term cost management benefits. Another important outcome of this unified management and control is the ability to automate policy enforcement across hybrid environments. This capability allows IT teams to set rules for data placement, retention and access across on-premises and cloud storage resources, ensuring consistent data governance and protection.
Cyber Resilience: The concept of cyber resilience can be summed up in a single question that IT and business leaders commonly ask when building out their storage environments: “How quickly will we be able to recover if we’re hit by an attack?” Data immutability features, which ensure that critical data cannot be deleted or modified, have become common in new storage offerings. To ensure speedy recovery, it is also important for organizations to have a backup storage environment specifically designed for recovery from cyber incidents (sometimes called a “data vault”), as well as an isolated “clean room” environment where they can recover their systems after an incident. Hybrid infrastructure gives organizations the flexibility to maintain both isolated backup environments and rapid recovery capabilities, whether restoring to a prestaged environment or leveraging the cloud to dynamically bring infrastructure online as needed, ensuring seamless continuity of operations. Organizations with strong cyber resilience see faster recovery times and may also experience cost savings in the form of reduced downtime and lower recovery expenses.
When building out their organizations’ hybrid data protection and storage environments, business and IT leaders should seek out solutions that deliver the following features and outcomes:
Compliance: Hybrid storage solutions give organizations significant control over where and how they store different types of data, helping them meet the requirements of data safety regulations such as HIPAA, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and the General Data Protection Regulation. By maintaining different storage tiers and locations for various data types, organizations can meet specific compliance needs, including requirements for long-term retention of some records and geographic restrictions on certain types of personal data.
Storage Management: By leveraging the centralized management capabilities of modern hybrid solutions, organizations can achieve superior visibility and control over their data protection and storage environments, even in a decentralized storage solution. These management tools enable IT teams to monitor performance, optimize capacity and automate routine tasks across both on-premises and cloud environments. Ultimately, these platforms can reduce management complexity while ensuring consistent policy enforcement.
Analytics: To help organizations attain actionable, mission-critical insights, analytics applications need instant access to relevant data. However, organizations that place all of their data in a high-performance environment will likely see significant cost overruns. Hybrid storage solutions help organizations support these data-intensive workloads by providing high-performance storage tiers for frequently accessed data while placing less critical archival data in more cost-effective environments.
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Security: Unified hybrid storage environments give organizations the control they need to implement consistent cybersecurity protections across all data environments, as well as the flexibility to apply additional security measures where needed. A comprehensive approach to securing hybrid storage environments may include features such as data encryption, identity and access management, and real-time monitoring for suspicious activity, both on-premises and in the public cloud.
Business Continuity: In addition to protecting themselves against cyberthreats, organizations must prepare for the possibility of natural disasters, hardware failures and human error. Hybrid storage solutions can help mitigate the danger of costly downtime through the use of features such as geographic redundancy, automatic failover, and comprehensive backup and disaster recovery capabilities. Leaders should take care to invest in solutions that help them meet their recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.
Flexibility: To keep pace with evolving business needs and emerging technologies, organizations need storage infrastructure that can quickly adapt and grow over time. Hybrid solutions provide this flexibility, enabling organizations to quickly scale their storage capacity up and down as needed via the public cloud. Hybrid infrastructure also gives IT teams the option to shift workloads between environments based on changing requirements or costs.
Cost Containment: For a time, many organizations sought to migrate nearly all resources to the public cloud. However, storing large data quantities in the cloud often leads to unmanageable recurring costs. By contrast, hybrid solutions let organizations place data in the most cost-effective environment. For instance, a team might decide to test a new application in the cloud, then pull the application and relevant data back on-premises for production.
Sustainability: Social and environmental responsibility is a growing concern for large enterprises across numerous industries. Hybrid solutions enable efficient resource use, providing more ways for organizations to optimize power consumption and cooling requirements. By placing data in the most appropriate storage environment, organizations can minimize their carbon output without sacrificing performance.
CDW can help you build out a future-proof hybrid data protection
and storage environment that’s optimized and flexible.
Marc Litten
Manager for Data Center Solution Strategy
