By Nishant Arora

New Delhi, Oct 3 (IANS): As enterprises the world over aim for a secured and faster Cloud experience, Hybrid Cloud solutions are turning out to be the preferred choice for them including in India for enhanced efficiency and productivity and improved cyber security, top executives have said.

A Hybrid Cloud is an integrated Cloud service utilising both private and public Clouds to perform distinct functions within the same organisation.

Enterprises the world over are moving to Hybrid Cloud faster than anyone expected to support digital transformation, drive business model innovation and fuel growth and Indian firms are not behind.

According to a latest report by Pune-based research firm MarketsandMarkets, the global Hybrid Cloud market is estimated to grow from $33.28 billion in 2016 to $91.74 billion by 2021.

"Hybrid Cloud solutions give you best of both the worlds. It gives you the flexibility of a private server along with the advantages of public Cloud," said Shashank Dixit, Founder and CEO of Deskera, a leading Cloud-based business software provider in the Asia-Pacific region.

"With the kind of talent and technology that we have in India and the demand for end-point security becoming a high priority, I can say that we are getting safer than before and we are moving towards more secured systems," Dixit told IANS.

A recent IBM study found that the top reasons executives cite for adopting Hybrid Cloud solutions are: lowering total cost of ownership (54 percent), facilitating innovation (42 percent), enhancing operational efficiencies (42 percent) and enabling them to more readily meet customer expectations (40 percent).

"Hybrid integration is the next stage in cloud adoption in India like other countries. Hybrid Cloud can help improve an organisation's operations by means of greater agility and speed, more effective reallocation of internal resources and better linkage between business and IT departments," said Vivek Malhotra, Cloud Leader, IBM India/South Asia.

Companies undertaking Hybrid Cloud initiatives found that these allowed them to expand into new industries (76 percent), create new revenue sources (71 percent) and create, support new business models (69 percent), revealed the study by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) based on in-person interviews and surveys of more than 1,000 C-suite executives from 18 industries.

"As clients continue to reap the benefits of integrating their on-premises infrastructure with the Cloud, we see them increasing their investments in new workloads on public Clouds," noted Marie Wieck, IBM, in the study.

Today, Microsoft, Dell-EMC, Hewlett-Packet Enterprise (HPE), Amazon Web Services and several others are trying to get a bigger pie of the growing Hybrid Cloud market.

With the right set of compliance standards, secure connectivity, firewalls and gateways deployed, Cloud is just a secure extension to the on-premise deployment.

"It is also imperative to select cloud vendors with security and compliance focus and expertise. Cloud data centres located in the country will boost data security. It is essential that the public cloud vendors should comply with security compliance standards and be thoroughly audited by third party security organisations rather than in-house claims," Malhotra told IANS.

Are Hybrid Cloud solutions safe in India?

"Properly architected Hybrid Cloud architectures are as safe and secure as any other option available to Chief information officers (CIOs). The important dimension is to weave in the security strategy at the point of genesis and ensure that it is holistic in its construct, covering all layers as well as data," Jaideep Mehta, Managing Director, International Data Corporation (IDC) South Asia, told IANS.

"Today, data security is paramount in India. Deskera has years of experience in ensuring data security on the Cloud. We believe we have the right technology needed for deploying secured business applications on the Cloud for Indian businesses and state governments," Dixit said.

According to Malhotra, IBM works with independent auditors and third-party organisations to meet the industry's most stringent guidelines to provide reports and information required for client's compliance needs for the Hybrid Cloud experience.