Happy New Year from i365! We’re just getting caught up with all of our reading after the holidays and came across this really informative Q&A in SearchDataBackup.com with Forrester analyst Rachel Dines about hybrid cloud backup.

We’ve been advocating a hybrid cloud approach (and seeing it firmly take hold in our customer base) for some time now with our  Cloud-Connected storage approach of providing data protection and disaster recovery services that use cloud-based resources to protect applications and data which reside on-premise at customer sites. This Cloud-Connected hybrid approach is gaining more prominence in the industry as well judging by the Q&A and a blog post last week by Gartner’s Cloud analyst Lydia  Leong, which stated:

It’s especially true among our (Gartner) mid-market clients, who are keenly interested in gradually migrating to cloud as their primary approach to infrastructure, hybrid models are critical to the migration path.

In terms of hybrid cloud backup AKA disk-to-disk-to-cloud, Dine’s Q&A discusses the pros and cons of this backup approach. It’s a very informative piece, bringing up things organizations need to consider when assessing whether the hybrid model is right for them. In terms of adoption, Dines answers:

I’ve seen a fair amount of adoption. People seem to be a lot more comfortable with disk-to-disk-to-cloud rather than directly going to the cloud or backup-as-a-service. Our most recent data from over the summer found that 23% of companies said that they were using some form of disk-to-disk-to-cloud. And that’s actually quite a bit. We also had a lot of people saying they were interested in it and investigating it.

Give it a read and let us know where your organization stands regarding the hybrid cloud.

For more on the hybrid cloud, go here to learn how one of our customers is using hybrid cloud backups to protect their data.